Filesystem performance problems

[Dennis Kibbe]

On Sun, 2011-08-21 at 12:57 -0700, Nathan England wrote:
> I have a hard drive that I use for storing and working with large tar
> archives, ranging from less than one MB to hundreds of MB and I have
> thousands of these archives. It is not convenient to format this drive
> and start over often, which I do about once every 6 months due to the
> problem I have. It seems that after a few months of working with these
> archives, unpacking, making modifications and tarring them back up,
> the whole system will get very slow, but particularly this drive.
> Since I cannot find any defrag programs, I'm not really sure what to
> do other than completely wipe the drive and restore the archives.
> 
> 
> Currently, this is an ext4 partition. I do not believe this ever
> happened with an ext3 partition, but it may have and I've just
> forgotten. 
> 
> 
> Are there any tools I can use to clean up an ext4 partition and
> recover some speed? Am I missing a defrag tool somewhere?
> 
> 
> All my googling is only returning how to recover corrupt partitions
> and such, but my partitions are not corrupt, that I know of, just
> slow.
> 
> 
> Nathan

Are all the files in one directory? I made the mistake of putting a few
thousand image files in one directory. It slowed access to a crawl.

Dennis Kibbe
-- 
Adjunct Faculty
Linux Operating System and System Administration
Business and Information Systems
Mesa Community College, Mesa, Arizona