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NTFS I ran into a bug just today that I'm still struggling to believe. A large Oracle server fell over, just reporting "IO errors". The issue was ultimately tr

NTFS I ran into a bug just today that I'm still struggling to believe. A large Oracle server fell over, just reporting "IO errors". The issue was ultimately traced to NTFS's handling of fragmentation[0]. I've gone about ten years thinking running a defrag - particular on a virtual disk sitting on a SAN in a RAID array - made no sense. Today's downtime says otherwise. It's one thing to perform poorly. But seeing services just die with disk write errors on a disk that's 30% full has left me with a very low opinion of NTFS. Our Oracle person sounds like a desktop maintenance person from the 90's making an issue out of "the importance of weekly defrags". [0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/kb/967351 https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/kb/967351

Spooky23 10y ago
In my DBA days in the 90s/2000s, this sort of issue was usually a lousy DBA that had extent sizes set too small. Windows can clearly handle big databases. The people getting paid to run the platform need to have a clue about the platforms they are running.
coredog64 10y ago
XFS is subject to fragmentation as well. Allegedly you can minimize it with some careful planning and mount options, but it seems easier just to enable the scheduled tsk that can be preempted.
vetrom 10y ago
It took btrfs the same thing (maybe only over a year or two though) to realize they needed automatically triggered rebalance, which is essentially a very similar operation.