On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 4:33 PM, Dale<rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: > Paul Hartman wrote: >> On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 3:22 PM, Grant<emailgr...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> Has anyone tried the shake defragmenter? >>> >> >> Yes, nothing has blown up yet. :) >> >> >> > > I used it a while back but couldn't really see a whole lot of > difference. The numbers said it helped but not much else changed. I > think logging into KDE was a little faster is about all. I'm with Alan > on this one. It just doesn't get fragmented like windoze does.
I think it really depends on the situation. For example I have a fast connection (20 megabit) so to maximize it I will often have several downloads in parallel, which causes files to be very fragmented. I have experienced a noticeable slowdown reading really fragmented files (2 or 3Mbyte/sec, when normal reads are around 45Mbyte/sec). At speeds that slow it can be slower than the burn speed of a DVD, which is not good, and it just slows everything down in gernal. Small files (less than 1 megabyte) are rarely fragmented and even when they are, it isn't going to have any significant effect on performance. I would defrag large files or files that are downloaded/appended, such as /usr/portage/distfiles and /var/log. If you're dealing with large digital camera pictures, audio or video then I would definitely defrag those files. Everything else in /usr/bin and so on are probably not fragmented to begin with since the files are are written at-once and whole when you emerge packages.
