Defrag

[Eric Shubert]

Bryan O'Neal wrote:
> Many of you know my feelings on file fragmentation in linux. However
> Keven is correct that EXT4 is the only approved way to gain defrag
> functionality short of cleaning the drive and moving your files back
> in starting with the largest and most frequently accessed files.

I presume by "defrag functionality" Bryan's talking generally about 
filesystem optimization. Defrag is but one aspect of filesystem 
optimization.

Indeed, defrag of ext3 doesn't seem to be as much of a concern as with 
FAT or NTFS. One way to defrag ext3 is to boot from a live CD, tar 
everything off to an external device, reformat the filesystem (or remove 
everything, but I thing reformatting might be faster), and tar 
everything back.

As Bryan hinted, if you could arrange the files in the tarball by 
frequency of use, that would provide an additional level of optimization.

There are a few other things you can do to improve ext3 performance. The 
noatime mount option will reduce the writes required to the device. 
There are also a few settings you can tweak with the tune2fs utility 
that can improve performance, such as dir_index, which is useful if you 
have any directories with a large number of files.

Of course, have a look at ext4 for the latest developments in this area. 
I haven't looked at ext4 in detail yet.
-- 
-Eric 'shubes'

> On Sun, Sep 19, 2010 at 1:21 PM, Kevin Faulkner
> <kondor6c at encryptedforest.net> wrote:
>> On Sunday 19 September 2010 07:19:05 Eric - A wrote:
>>> Hi All,  I was wondering if I could defrag my hard drive under ubuntu 10.04
>>> ?
>>>
>> ext4 does have online defragmentation, however I don't think it is available
>> for Ubuntu.
>> https://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Ext4_Howto#Online_defragmentation
>>
>>> .
>>> Eric - A
>>> .
>>>
>>>
>>>
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