Hello list ! Some collegues of mine recently asked me a question, considering me - falsely - to be some sort of a PC-guru. They all use flavours of Windows and frequently have all sorts of problems. Occasionally I'm able to help, but mostly I'm just telling them to use the "Vulcan Nerve Pinch" (the windoze three-finger-salute : <Ctrl><Alt><Delete>) repeatedly until their systems reboots, eventually running a "scandisk". However, it seems that after doing so many times their systems slow down quite some. I've told them to run their defragmentation-program at least once a month, and the other day I actually watched the program in action, assembling an enormous amount of files, all spread out over the entire disk. Took quite some time. Now, of course, they asked me : how often do you do this defrag-thing ?
My answer : Never, 'cause I don't have to : I use linux on my desktop and OS/2 on my laptop ! Now, on the OS/2 - side, I know that the filesystem (HPFS) is arranged in a binary tree fashion, which makes disk-reads/writes extremely fast and at the same time re-arranges everything to optimal performance. One can constantly notice the action on the disk : when there's no other activity going on, the system uses the "idle" time to clean things up. Cool ! On my linux-box I use the Reiser filesystem. Never had a problem with it, even after a power-outage. Seems a little mysterious, though. Earlier, when I used ext2, the system made a file-check every 20'th boot or so, displaying messages like : "1.6% non-contigous". Fine with me, but the Reiser-FS just boots and boots happily and never seems to care about fragmentation at all ? Performance is blazingly fast even running KDE, Star Office and all sorts of other applications simultanously - never seems to need a defragmentation a la windoze. I guess the same goes for other journalling filesystems as well : ext3, XFS and JFS (the latter really being an OS/2 thing) ??? And here's my very unimportant question to you : was I lying ? Kaj Haulrich
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