* A. Pagaltzis: >> On Windows, perhaps. On most UNIX systems, this is very hard >> to do and often not supported at all by the file system. > > Then again, Unix filesystems tend to be designed such > that as long as there is sufficient free space on the > device, fragmentation will remain insignificant.
It's been this way on Windows for a couple of years, too. 8-) All this doesn't help that much if you've got a large file which grows over time. For example, running "filefrag" on a Monotone database stored on an ext3 file system before and after a small "pull" results in: monotone.db: 9257 extents found, perfection would be 1 extent monotone.db: 9403 extents found, perfection would be 1 extent This is with a page size of 4096 bytes. The default of 1024 is probably even worse.
