[olug] Anyone defragging their linux servers?

[Will Langford]

On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 1:08 PM, Obi-Wan <obiwan at jedi.com> wrote:

> Even my desktop's home directory, which is 96% full and sees fairly
> heavy R/W access, is only 8% non-contiguous.  In nearly 20 years as
> a professional Unix sysadmin, I've never defragged a Unix filesystem.
> There's just no point in any situation I've seen.
>

I've hit a few times when dealing with a lot of proportionately large files
to their container file system that I've fragmented ext2 over 50% :).  Of
course, after cleaning up and freeing up space, things went back to sanity.

Hell, I can easily point to a tiny doesnt-matter thing and that my tiny
/boot is currently 18% non-contiguous hehehhe.

Perhaps that's a good point to make to the management type -- the file
system itself will over time work on defragmenting itself as files are
created and destroyed.... just as a by product of how their designed rather
than requiring intervention.

-Will