Here is my small case study on Defrag--- looking comments
I have been running Debian unstable for a couple of years now and I had
noticed that Disk thrashing is happening more and more. Here was my
theory:
Debian unstable, running gnome desktop, mythtv, basic apps.
/dev/hda1 = ext3 /boot ~100M
/dev/hda2 = swap ~1024M
/dev/hda3 = ext3 / ~80G
/ is one partition that is about 80 G
a few nfs mounts but only for shared media (archive video/mp3) data and
no program or regular program data is stored on them.
Mythtv uses the / space for its video data in /var/lib/mythtv (bad
design but it would have required a re-arch of the box to change it.
That is next on my list of tasks)
Due to apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade almost daily and mythtv
keeping my 80G HD about 85% full all the time I was beginning to think
that even the best file system attempts to keep files from fragmenting
were not going to be enough.
I started looking into ext2defrag a quite a while ago but didn't really
have a way to run it. Downloaded a Knoppix cd and burned it. booted
into Knoppix and ran ext2defrag /dev/hda3.
Well, either my theory was right or something else was causing it but
the drive was _VERY_ fragmented. While no indicators of how fragmented
were shown in defrag I watched as it moved blocks around and lined them
up and many blocks were being reformed from all over the disk space.
I haven't had sufficient time to see if this has helped yet but it did
give me a little insight into defragging and Linux file systems. If you
are running a fairly extreme case like mine you may want to look into
it.
*** One word of caution that I didn't see until after I started, (stupid
me) but once you start you are committed. You cannot stop the defrag
for any reason <ctrl>-c, reboot, power, kernel crash, act of deity,
otherwise it will leave your filesystem in a terminally broken state.
In other words, do backups and allow ample time (about 4 hours for my
80G Drive) for it to complete.
--
Bill Warner <
wwarner42@cox.net>
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