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