Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto wrote:
[...] what would be the best way to defrag it?
By not defragging it.
[...]
I don't buy into that argument and never did. Every few months I
copy the
whole HD to another one and then back to counter fragmentation (ext3)
and
the system becomes noticeably faster after doing it (speed increase in
emerge --sync for example.) Maybe it's not fragmentation but rather
related
files being more closely together after I do this.
How exactly do you copy the files? [...]
I simply boot from the Gentoo DVD and rsync to another ext3 partition,
wipe the current filesystem and then rsync back.
OK, I once again verified that fragmentation seems to be a big issue
even on Linux. I just migrated to ext4, and in order to do that I had
to rsync, format and rsync back. The result is similar to the last time
I did this (over 8 months ago):
emerge --sync takes 15 seconds (at least 3 minutes yesterday)
update-eix takes 2 seconds (20 seconds yesterday)
And I don't believe it's due to ext4. It's a nice speed-up from ext3,
but not THAT nice.
