On 28 Nov 2008, at 11:46, Alan McKinnon wrote:
On Friday 28 November 2008 13:14:42 Dale wrote:
If this is a little high, what would be the best way to defrag it?
By not defragging it.
It's not Windows. Windows boxes needs defragging not because
fragmentation is
a huge problem in itself, but because windows filesystems are a
steaming mess
of [EMAIL PROTECTED] that do little right and most things wrong. Defrag treats
the
symptom, not the cause :-)
I have occasionally heard this said about the Mac's HFS filing system,
too - that "it's not windows", it doesn't need defragging, Apple
provides no tools for defragging (true) and that the benefits of
defragging are mythical.
Whilst I have to agree that many of the system repair & maintenance
"techniques" I've read used by well-established Mac "technicians" are
clearly smoke & mirrors, I have myself noticed REMARKABLE performance
improvements by running iDefrag.
Reiser tends to self-balance itself out. What is especially
noteworthy is that
none of the general purpose Linux filesystems provide a defrag
utility.
Theodore 'Tso and Hans Reiser are both exceptional programmers, if
there was
a need for such a tool they would assuredly have written one. They
did not,
so there probably isn't.
I understood that ReiserFS's trees could become out-of-balance,
resulting in performance loss, and that the way to deal with this was
to tar the contents of the drive to another file-system and then untar
them back.
More information on the subject - beyond the sort of idle chitchat one
finds on lists like this one - is not terribly obvious, but Wikipedia
suggests I may possibly be correct:
Also, ReiserFS had a problem with very fast filesystem aging when
compared to other filesystems - in several usage scenarios
filesystem
performance lowered dramatically with time.
...
There are no programs to specifically defragment a ReiserFS file
system, although tools have been written to automatically copy the
contents of fragmented files hoping that more contiguous blocks of
free space can be found. However, Reiser4 will have a repacker that
optimizes file fragmentation.
(It also seems to suggest that tarring the files elsewhere &
reformatting the drive is not the best solution. Using `rm` to remove
everything from the filesystem may do the trick, but you might want to
dd zeros onto it before reformatting to be sure).
Stroller.
