Lubos Lunak said the following on 02/15/2010 05:03 AM:
On Saturday 13 of February 2010, John Heinen wrote:
How do I know when and how to defrag my computer with open suse , or don't I have to worry about it?
As demonstrated also in this thread, there is a widely accepted myth that defragmenting is completely useless with Linux, and as such nobody has been really bothered enough to write any reasonably usable generic tool.
Not quite correct. As I said, I wrote a defrag tool on SCO for the V7 file system back in the mod 1980s. When I ran metrics on the results I was disappointed. The improvement was negligible. Since then we have developed file systems that are less prone to fragmentation in the first place. Add to that denser, smaller drives (less head movement), better placement strategies, packing of small files, and much more. Like cheaper memory and better caching. Back in the 80's I couldn't price my defrag tool so that it was a better buy than a new disk drive. And the price of rotating magnetic media continues to fall. On top of that, as you point out, SSDs are coming along.
If you care about this enough to do some work, you can e.g. google for how to deframent some files that make Firefox startup slower, and similar issues.
That's a different issue. I posted that reference, and it was about a FILE not a file system, and a database file at that. I'd hardly call it the same kind of issue. Heck, you can speed up databases by adding the correct index files, and that has _nothing_ to do with defragmentation. -- Mary had a little key (It's all she could export), and all the email that she sent was opened at the Fort. -- Ron Rivest -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org