Misty, On Tuesday 10 August 2004 07:35, Misty Stanley-Jones wrote:
Shuffling does not ensue as you say. The filesystem (most modern ones at least) are perfectly capable of dealing with non-contiguous files. Dynamic filesystems such as Reiser, VxFS (probably the free version too), and I do believe ext3 are perfectly capable of defragmenting themselves as files grow. You are also perfectly allowed to adjust the block size of your filesystem if you are very paranoid about running out of inodes due to many small files.
But if you don't shuffle to minimize fragmentation as files that share sectors or allocation units grow, then access times would suffer over time, no? I can certainly see the possibility of addressing all the issues of of sub-sector allocation, but I was just surprised that it had been done. As I said, at one time I knew the Unix kernel quite well, but that was a long time ago. Clearly lots of progress has been made. Kudos to the folks that did all this and made it reliable! I have been noticing that my latest Linux install, for which I chose XFS, seems to be very easy on the disk drives, in that they make much less seek noise than I'm used to under heavy loads.
Misty
Randall Schulz