„This article is idiotic, sorry to say so. In 12 years of UNIX + Linux administration I have never ever seen a system suffering from fragmentation. This entire “Linux needs a defrag tool as well” nonsense is just that: nonsense.”

Right…. and I guess YOU know more than Theodore Ts’o, the primary developer of ext3 and ext4 WHO HAS BUILT A DEFRAGMENTATION UTILITY FOR EXT4. I wonder why he did that? Did he do it for fun? No… Did he do it because he was high? … no… HE DID IT BECAUSE IT’S NEEDED! …… YOU MORON!

You forgot mention that you’re also incompetent and probably an arteest; Since you are a self-admitted unproductive and incompetent asshole, do the world some good and go kill yourself (to further make up for you sorry shithole existence, please make to sign your organ donor card prior to offing yourself AND make sure to write a note to inform the medical team that no part of your diseased brain should be used as medical material).

You State:
„Additionally, I really don’t care about manufactured cases of fragmentation … I have never seen the levels of fragmentation mentioned in this article in real world experience using ext2/3.”

That’s probably a reflection of your lack of experience and competence in the field of computing.

Now WRT to defragmentation, REAL Engineers like myself have seen horrendous fragmentation problems with linux ext2/ext3 filesystems both in serious mission critical environments and in enduser environments. For example we sold professional carrier grade voice-mail systems to some of the largest mobile operators in Asia and the United States, these voice mail systems that serve millions of users each in large Asian cities, get heavily fragmented extremely fast (i.e. 1 month) and suffer crippling slow downs; we had to write our own proprietary (unfortunately) defragger for linux ext2 and ext3 in order to solve the problem. Note equivalent systems that used NTFS (YUCK!) didn’t suffer these problems, because of their online defragmentation capability. The only reason that our customer chose our open-systems linux based systems over proprietary systems was that for the same hardware we could deliver twice the capacity of a Windows system (windows is slow and bloated); imagine the embarrassment of the technical team when our linux based messaging systems started becoming slower than the Windows based systems that the mobile operator was trying to get rid of. Investigation revealed that the problem was file fragmentation; defragging the system ‘cured’ the problem. Fragmentation is real problem with ext2/ext3 and shoving you head up you ass isn’t going make the problem go away. Congratulations to the fine authors of this article for showing some solutions that any end user could benefit from.

Hi, I hope you somehow still get this, although I would not be surprised if you just „forgot” all about this thread… and I dont blame you if you did…

What some people seem to forget is that you try to improve our world. And some of the idots here should first learn some manners in how to deal with others… I guess it says more about them than about you..

But on the main subject of this thread and in support of you : forget the idots that say that fragmentation is „not an issue”. I know they try to intimidate you to shut up but ignore them, for they don’t know what they are talking about.

I am working 30 years in computers and electronics and software so I am going to say to all imbecieles that argue the fragmentation issue:

” YOU DO NOT EVEN HAVE A BASIC UNDERSTANDING OF HOW A HARD DISK WORKS! ”

Otherwise you would understand why fragmentation occurs in ANY operating system! The fact that you let a system run without defrag-ing does not mean it isn’t there and if you dont notice it, then you simply have a fast enough system. Still does not mean that it is not occuring!

IGNORING defrag does NOT make it go away!

SO BEFORE ANY OF YOU TELL OPTIMIZINGKIT TO LEARN SOFTWARE, YOU SHOULD FIRST LEARN ABOUT SOME BASIC HARDWARE (hint: start with how a harddisk works!)..

Optimizingkit: good luck and keep working at a better world..

No, Fragmentation is not a problem on Linux. I’ve never once cleared 5% non-contiguous space in all my years of using Linux. I’ve known people who’ve done decades of work on UNIX who have said they’ve never had fragmentation problems.

Existence of fragmentation is not even a problem. Simply becaus Linux, unlike Windows, actually runs like an operating system should run: RAM is used efficiently, resulting in swap being used rarely in large-RAM systems, only maybe a few megabytes for binary image purposes for the most part. And of course, hard disks are managed in a good way.

Compare it to Windows: The memory model sucks because Windows likes o use way too much RAM for itself. It uses its swap file heavily even when given lots of RAM. And don’t get me started on the delicate and horrible way FAT and NTFS fragment.

This article seems poorly written, almost as of the author is either FUDing, pulling „facts” out of thin air, or else, he’s a n00b coming from Windows trying to attribute one of Windows’ greatest failures to Linux as well.

Here’s a few facts:

1. Yes, there is fragmentation in Linux.

2. No, said fragmentation is not a problem.

3. Said fragmentation rarely, if ever, seems to reach over 10% of a decently-sized partition.

4. Defragging tools do exist for every Linux file system, but almost all of them are off-line. These defraggers are part of the *fstool packages, usually as part of their respective fscks.

5. These defragging features and tools are used for partitioning work. For example: You want to shrink a 300 GiB partition to a 150 GiB, GPartEd will run fsck before and after maniulating the partition to manage both errors and any non-contiguous space it can.

6. There is no real performance hit from fragmentation in Linux, as the physical arrangement of files, coupled with excellend buffering, caching, and othe rbuzzworded techniques provided by the Linux kernel basically negate it.

7. Serious fragmentation only happens in Linux when a file system reaches over 90% capacity. YES I INCLUDE REISERFS IN THAT, TOO!

8. If your Linux FSes are over 90% full, you’ve got bigger problems to worry about then fragmentation. Thank the Programmer Linux uses a separate partition for swap.