[gentoo-user] Re: {OT} Allow work from home?

[Kai Krakow]

Am Wed, 20 Jan 2016 01:46:29 +0100
schrieb lee <lee@××××××××.de>:

> The time before, it wasn't
> a VM but a very slow machine, and that also took a week.  You can have
> the fastest machine on the world and Windoze always manages to bring
> it down to a slowness we wouldn't have accepted even 20 years ago.

This is mainly an artifact of Windows updates destroying locality of
data pretty fast and mainly a problem when running on spinning rust.
DLLs and data files needed for booting or starting specific
software become spread wide across the hard disk. Fragmentation isn't
the issue here - NTFS is pretty good at keeping it low. Still, the
right defragmentation tool will help you: I always recommend staying
away from the 1000 types of "tuning tools", they actually make it worse
and take away your chance of properly optimizing the on-disk file
layout. And I always recommend using MyDefrag and using its system disk
defrag profile to reorder the files in your hard disk. It takes ages
the first time it runs but it brings back your system to almost out of
the box boot and software startup time performance. It uses some very
clever ideas to place files into groups and into proper order - other
than using file mod and access times like other defrag tools do (which
even make the problem worse by doing so because this destroys locality
of data even more).

But even SSDs can use _proper_ defragmentation from time to time for
increased lifetime and performance (this is due to how the FTL works
and because erase blocks are huge, I won't get into detail unless
someone asks). This is why mydefrag also supports flash optimization.
It works by moving as few files as possible while coalescing free space
into big chunks which in turn relaxes pressure on the FTL and allows to
have more free and continuous erase blocks which reduces early flash
chip wear. A filled SSD with long usage history can certainly gain back
some performance from this.

-- 
Regards,
Kai

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