Lubos Lunak wrote:
On Monday 15 of February 2010, James Knott wrote:
Lubos Lunak wrote:
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.
Given that modern file systems are fragmentation resistant, please explain how fragmentation is a problem on Linux.
That article still doesn't explain why defragging helps on files that are not likely to be fragmented. Modern file systems try to write data in contiguous blocks. They do this by finding areas of the drive space that can hold the entire file (and then some) without fragmentation. As long as there is a reasonable amount of free space, this will generally happen. This means that there won't be many files for a defrag app to defrag. Defragging is necessary on FAT and to a lesser extent on NTFS because free space is used sequentially, in whatever block is available next, until the entire file is written. Even then, on those file systems, fragmentation can be reduced by going with larger cluster sizes. Also, a direct comparison of Windows vs Linux load times is meaningless, without going into the details of what gets loaded when. When Microsoft released XP, they claimed it loaded faster than W2000 etc. What they failed to mention was that while the desktop appeared faster, it was essentially useless for a period of time, until things settled down. By contrast, with the KDE desktop, you can click on something as soon as you can see it and the app will open eventually. Which is faster now??? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org