Jay Sprenkle wrote:
On 9/13/05, Dennis Jenkins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
It depends on lots of things: the OS, the filesystem, the % free space
on the file system, other processes that are causing the OS to allocate
disk blocks. I have noticed that Windows XP totally sucks at keeping
files fragment free when copying them. Even if there is enough free
space to hold the destination file contiguously, the OS won't do it. I
have rarely bothered to check file fragmentation on Linux and FreeBSD
systems, so I don't know how those handle it (but I would assume it to
be much more intelligent than NTFS).
ugh! Thanks for letting us know about that.
There's no way I know of to control fragmentation.
I've been assuming if you copy a complete file within a short time period
to a new location it will likely be less fragmented that the original. It's
not
always true, but in my experience it's simple and generally tends to be
true over the long run. If a user will not do defrag on their disk there's
not
a lot you can do to correct for it.
Actually, you can defrag the database file yourself, if you have admin
rights (b/c you need to open a handle to the physical device).
