On 7/4/03 5:33, "Allen Watson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> This also explains, in my opinion, why some people swear by rebuilding the
> database periodically, claiming it benefits performance. They'd get the same
> boost from just making a duplicate.
Yes and no. Rebuilding defragments the database as well - if you have done
any cleaning in your database - such as deleting a lot of messages, or
archiving then removing old messages - this will make a difference.
>
> The only other application I've noticed getting a boost after defragmenting
> is FileMaker Pro, in the very large databases I use to archive my e-mail
> messages. Again, frequent changes are the culprit; I archive once a day, and
> have over 21000 messages in my archive currently, and growing. Same thing
> helps there, just duplicating the file, deleting the original and renaming
> the duplicate like the original.
I think any database like that will benefit from defragmenting (or, as you
say, copying).
>
> Bottom line seems to be, defragmenting the entire disk does not really help
> much. Far better just to occasionally duplicate any files that are very
> large and frequently updated (with additions and deletions; in-place
> modifications won't affect fragmentation).
I don't agree with that article. I have seen performance increases after
defragmenting. It all depends on what kind of files you have.
>
> The one area in which I am not sure I agree with the article's conclusions
> is in regard to system swap files. OS X depends on some rather large swap
> files. It can easily create a gigabyte of swap files (in chunks of about 800
> MB, I believe) during a long period of uptime, running many different
> applications. If you don't have about a gig's worth of 800 MB chunks lying
> around, you will probably end up with some fragmented swap files. For a
> time, I operated OS X from a 1.5 GB partition (something I learned is not a
> good idea). I had about 700 MB of total free space on that partition; my
> swap files got really badly fragmented. When that happened, my system slowed
> to a crawl. Just restarting was like being reborn. Defragging the disk
> frequently helped delay the inevitable slowdown and give me a much longer
> workable uptime, although it did not prevent the eventual degradation.
That is one point that the author paid no attention to. However, I don't
think that you should ever let your Mac churn out 10 or more swap files;
even 3 or 4 seems like a lot to me. Given the number of times the system has
to check those swap files and manage them, I have found that it slows down
performance considerably, especially on slower machines.
This affects other apps as well - Photoshop uses scratch files; Photoshop
Elements, on my machine, slows down a lot when many files are open and the
system has a few swap files open.
Kirk
My forthcoming book: Unix for Mac OS X: Learning the Command Line
http://www.mcelhearn.com/unix.html
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. . . . . . . [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.mcelhearn.com . . . . . .
. . Kirk McElhearn | Chemin de la Lauze | 05600 Guillestre | France . .
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