On Wed, Oct 03, 2007 at 04:24:59PM +0200, Damir Perisa wrote: > the file itself is not fragmented. but the files all together are not > at the same place after a long time of usage. in the worst case the > harddrive has to do seek for every file instead of by one run read > the whole pacman database. > > since this fragmentation happens only over a long time (years), most > of the users will not feel the optimisation immediately. it makes > also an implementation of a more sophisticated (complex) database > futile. (a mysql db would be much faster than accessing single files > i guess) >
I don't know if this is just an impression, but I find my hard disk awfully slow for a few months. The two main apps concerned are pacman and mutt, since they both deal with a lot of files. # sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches # time pacman -Qu Checking for package upgrades... no upgrades found. pacman -Qu 0,61s user 0,52s system 1% cpu 1:20,00 total Well, actually, it seems like it's even slower using this drop_caches trick than after a fresh boot, but I'm not even sure.. pacman-optimize didn't help at all. This is with a laptop, core duo t2300, 1gb ram, 80gb sata disk, ext3 filesystem. The disk is apparently a FUJITSU MHV2080BH. Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda5 9.2G 6.2G 2.6G 72% / I also have an older desktop, p4 3.2ghz, 1gb ram. But it has two "WD 36.7Go 10000 RPM S-ATA (Raptor)" in raid 0. ext3 filesystem too. So it's supposed to be faster, but the above command run in 3 seconds. So 27x faster? Isn't that a lot? Also, I don't remember this laptop was that slow when I got it one year ago. _______________________________________________ arch mailing list [email protected] http://archlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/arch
