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Jeremy Pearson wrote: | | Coming from a Windows environment I'm used to performing regular | defragmentation on FAT32 and NTFS partitions.
Very bad design, why did they not just run the defragmentation process as a low priority task like say Veritas filesystems and hide the details from the end user or admin?
| Do I need to defragment EXT2 | partitions in the same way? And if so, which tools do people use?
First why are you using EXT2? For most general purpose systems a journalled filesystem gives better performance with quicker fsck if the machine is ever shutdown uncleanly, try ReiserFS or ext3 next time it asks.
You can convert ext2 to ext3 but I think that more hassle than the beginner will care for to save a few minutes next time there is a powercut.
The standard answer (search engines are your friend) is that no, the filesystem allocation strategy used by this family of file systems is smart enough that degradation is insignificant.
There maybe unusual disk activity patterns that makes an ext2 filesystem less than optimal but it is not common to encounter this, in such cases backup, newfs and restore is the standard procedure, in 15 years of Unix admin work I've never encountered performance issues from filesystem fragmentation (except on MS Windows).
A lot of that work was on systems with proprietary filesystems that were prone to fragmentation (it can be better for performance to leave just a little mess if you know someone will clean it up after you) but they had a built in defragmentation task running continually.
The ext2 allocation strategy depends on having a lot of free disk space, which is why most some filesystems reserve 10% of disk space for "root only". Since disk drives are now much larger (relative to average, and even maximum file size (often 2GB), 10% may be very wasteful - see "man tune2fs" - "reserve block count").
Obligatory tunefs joke: you can tune a filesystem but you can't tune-a-fish -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
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