Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2702 mails)

[bcr@xxxxxxxxxxx (Bill C. Riemers)]

Juergen Braukmann wrote:
> 
> Alexander Daniloff wrote:
> can be found in the archives, the short is:
> 
> it doesn´t require defragmentation. The is rumor about a tool, but this
> might still cost the live of your file system.

I've used the tool, and it works.  However, the recommended procedure is you
do your full backup, then you run the defrag tool.  Without the defrag tool
the way to defragment is to do your full backup.  Recreate the partition.
Restore from backup.  The defrag tool saves you the time of restoring from
backup.  If IO performance is VERY critical for your application, then you
should consider taking your machine down for a couple hours on a weekly or
monthly basis to do this.

However, the average Linux application barely touches the disk.  If you have enough
memory it is rare you'll even see your drive light come on for anything other than
touching file time stamps.  So it really isn't worth the effort.
 
> The way ext2 allocates disk memory is in a way that sektors are assigned
> "just in case". At least, this technique doesn´t make defragmentation
> nessesarry, a file wont be split over the whole harddisk.

Yes and no.  It make fragmentation less likely.  But sometimes you can get a fragmented
disk, if you are doing lots of random read/write access.  I have gotten a partition up
to 20 0.000000ragmentation.  That is the one and only time I used the 'defrag' tool.  My general
conclusion after that is it is just easier to keep partition sizes at a reasonable size
so I can free up a partition when necessary can defrag by moving data from one partition
to another.    Then leave the old partition around for awhile.  That way I have on disk
backup.  It doesn't help for disk crashes, but it does help for accidentally removes and
overwrites.  The advantage of defraging in the process is minimal.

                        Bill

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