Wednesday 19 April 2006 08:22, James Rayner wrote: | On 4/19/06, Damir Perisa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: | > Tuesday 18 April 2006 21:00, RedShift wrote: | > | Don't worry about it. Fragmentation doesn't really have any | > | effect on linux filesystems. | > | > it horribly has... my reiser3 root-fs is horribly fragmented and | > access times are very bad... if i copy a whole dir to a new | > place and move it back, it becomes around 10x faster. | | It's 10x faster because it's cached. The kernel caches data very | heavily, and the drive too has a cache. | Take for example, untarring a kernel source tarball. the first | time will be slow, second time will be lightning quick because of | the various caches on the system. you are right saying caching helps. but i'm quite sure it's not caching involved as i have only 768mb of ram and the partition in question is 28/29gb full and i try to access a genome sequence of the size of 1.7gb ... so i cannot imagine it is cached somewhere (no space on hdd, no space in ram for the whole thing).
| If your filesystems are that bad, after what you said was years of
| use, then it wouldnt hurt to backup and reinstall. You're doin
| pretty well to still be running a system that long.
you are absolutely right. the biggest problem i have is to have some
space to do the backup while playing around with the parititions...
and then - this time - i want to choose a fs that will keep running
not just some years but forever without getting fragmented or
whatever may a fs suffer from. unluckily i'm having probably the
worst kind of data on my computer as biggest sizes... small text
files from 1kb up to 600kb in size but around 190'000 files total
(fasta and genbank files of different loci)... and reading now all
this papers about fragmentation i0m actually quite surprised that it
worked so far without any mroe severe effect.
to raise the discussion subthread: what filesystem would be the most
reasonable to have for system parititions (/ and /home) and what fs
for a partition having lots of small files? XFS? reiser4? any expert
among us here?
- D
--
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
-- Albert Einstein
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