On 4/12/05 at 6:36 PM, Ben Kennedy ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) said:
>On 12 4 2005 at 6:25 pm -0400, Steve Abrahamson wrote:
>
>>You don't think there'd be some overhead associated with managing 1,600+
>>fragments, do you? Nah.
>
>I am not a hardware engineer (disk drive designer) nor a low-level
>filesystem developer, but I again caution against getting too up in arms
>about this number.
Well, I'm not up in arms over it. The pitchforks remain in the hay, the
torches unlit. I'm just saying that it's a possible culprit.
>There is no way you can make that deduction based on the evidence you
>described.
Oh, true - it's a theory.
>So, you copied a file a number of times and it ended up in fewer
>fragments. That's all you know.
Exactly.
>Now, to a question: How much free space do you have on your disk? My
>guess is not much...?
7.3 gigs free.
But there was once a day when it was almost filled up, and I believe that
the remnants of that day are swiss cheese all over the face of the drive.
>>Should a mail app be expected to take more responsibility than other apps
>>for the state of it's file? Can it? I don't know either, but it's an
>>interesting question, at least.
>
>Maybe, but again, I'm not sure that this is relevant at all to your
>performance problems.
And again, I'm totally open to hearing more ideas and theories as to what
might be causing it, and moreover, how to alleviate it. I have no stock
in the defragmentation business: I just want PM to not be so slow. If the
cause and fix lie elsewhere, magnifico.
>Here's another question: How much RAM do you have, and how much is free?
> Open a terminal window, type "top", hit control-C, and copy the first 6
>lines of the screen into a message here.
Or just look at Activity Monitor and check the memory usage.
I've got about 15% free memory right now. I'm sure that fluctuates
through the day.
>I bet your disk is full and your RAM is in high contention so that your
>system is thrashing a lot of VM.
So my question on that is this: is that purely a current-state issue, or
a historical issue as well? That is, if I add RAM so that, say, 45% of my
memory is free (low VM usage there), but I was *once* memory constrained,
and I have lots o' room free on my disk but I *once* had a very full
disk, are there remaining "scars" (if you will) from those states?
Steve Abrahamson
Ascending Technologies
FileMaker 7 Certified Developer
http://www.asctech.com
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
