Ubuntu question for Neil.
Moderators: NeilBlanchard, Ralf Hutter, sthayashi, Lawrence Lee
-
- *Lifetime Patron*
- Posts: 4284
- Joined: Fri Apr 04, 2003 6:21 pm
- Location: Undisclosed but sober in US
Ubuntu question for Neil.
Is there a defrag tool or maintainance tools for Ubuntu?
Short answer: It's not needed.
Longer answer: Linux is smart enough to first attempt to guess the size of a newly created file, and hence reserve that much space for it, and then when reading re-order the requests instead of having to move the files physically. That's one of the advantages of being built on a multi-user base.
For en even longer answer, see this post.
Now, a couple of new and fancy file-systems add a background defragmenter (that might also do other things), but for the most common filesystems it's simply not needed, at least in the sense that the system loses a lot of performance if it's not regularly defragged.
Longer answer: Linux is smart enough to first attempt to guess the size of a newly created file, and hence reserve that much space for it, and then when reading re-order the requests instead of having to move the files physically. That's one of the advantages of being built on a multi-user base.
For en even longer answer, see this post.
Now, a couple of new and fancy file-systems add a background defragmenter (that might also do other things), but for the most common filesystems it's simply not needed, at least in the sense that the system loses a lot of performance if it's not regularly defragged.
Last edited by floffe on Mon Oct 22, 2007 3:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.
-
- Moderator
- Posts: 7681
- Joined: Mon Dec 09, 2002 7:11 pm
- Location: Maynard, MA, Eaarth
- Contact: