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Defragmentation of Linux Filesystems
- manny 18y agoOne way of defragging your files: moving all your content over to a fresh partition and moving it back equates to a completely unfragmented file system.
- pmjordan 18y agoI don't know. All that effort, and I'm not even sure the quoted improvement is outside the error of measurement. The author doesn't specify the hardware here either, and the sustained rate of 15MB/s (peak: <35MB/s) seems to me like it's fairly old. His graphs are anything but convincing: need better data. Really, the best thing you can do to improve your HDD performance is to: 1. Throw out ext3 and replace it with a better file system - consensus seems to be XFS if you have lots of large files, Reiser if you have lots of small ones or JFS for a nice blend. I personally have been using JFS for pretty much everything for a few years. 2. Buy a better hard disk. Good SATA disks are blazing fast these days. Get a Serial Attached SCSI RAID if the lack of speed is costing you money.
- manny 18y agoAlso, ZFS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS) might be worth looking into.
- pmjordan 18y agoAs far as I know, there's no ZFS support in the mainstream Linux distributions at the moment, although I admit I haven't looked into it. To be honest, I'd probably only use it in anger once they GPL it and it goes into either the mainline kernel or it at least is adopted by a commercial distribution. Of course, on Solaris, go knock yourself out. :)
- newt0311 18y agoIndeed, no ZFS support in major linux distributions due to licensing issues. FreeBSD has support for it though.
- newt0311 18y agoAnother more important question, does the extra fragmentation actually affect performance and how does fragmentation behave over time (as linux file systems tend to de-fragment themselves during use)?