Re: [gentoo-user] Linux, reiserfs and file fragmentation

[Alan McKinnon]

On Thursday 14 February 2008, Dale wrote:
> I did a little test.  Something fishy here.  I did a test with the
> /data partition.  I store pictures and documents there and it was
> fragmented. I cp -av to another reiserfs formatted partition then
> remade the file system and copied it back using basically the same
> command just in reverse.  This is what I got now:
>
> root@smoker / # /root/fragck.pl /data/
> 3.88457269700333% non contiguous files, 1.04344379261138 average
> fragments. root@smoker / #
>
> That is not a lot better than it was before.  It was 4.6% before.
>  How is that?  I copied it over then ran the command right after
> without even touching the files.
>
> Any ideas?  Is there a limit to the fragmenting "smallness"?

Don't worry about fragmentation on reiserfs. This is not a valid concept 
for reiser or for ext2/3.

Fragmentation is problematic on Windows machines because that code is 
brain dead. Some people seem to assume that it must therefore be 
problematic on all file systems. Reiserfs is not brain dead, it is 
intelligent and will balance itself out over time. It also has tail 
packing which can make fragmentation stats look odd if enabled.

Short answer:

Don't worry about it. Let reiserfs do what it wants to do when it wants 
to do it - it is much much much better at these decisions than you will 
ever be ;-)

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com

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