[KLUG Members] Defrag'ing ext3 filesystems?

[Bruce Smith]

Okay, all the usenet messages I've been reading about ext2/3 not needing
to be defragmented are full of crap!

Yesterday when I was downloading the ISO images for Redhat 8.0,
I was running two downloads at once, saving to the same partition.
This is sure to fragment the ISO images, but no problem, at
least according to the messages I've been reading in usenet...

When I tried to burn these images yesterday, I first thought my hard
drive was going bad.  My (otherwise unloaded) system couldn't keep the
CDR's buffer full, even after slowing it down to 8X.  (thank goodness
for burnproof!).  And everything else (that used the hard drive) on my
system slowed to a crawl.  And the CPU usage was still 90+% idle.

My system, and the ISO images, are on a IBM Ultra Wide SCSI hard drive!

Normally my system never breaks a sweat, or goes below 100% buffer full
when burning at 12X.  But testing with cdrecord -dummy today showed the
same behavior at 8X & 12X.

I copied the ISO images over to an IDE drive on the same computer (took
forever), and they burned them fine off the IDE drive, 100% buffer all
the way.  I copied them back to the SCSI drive (much faster than the
first copy), and they now burn fine from the original location.

I've seen some defragment programs for ext2.  Does anyone know if they
work on ext3?

Adam:  Checking the KLUG mailing list archives, I saw you had a defrag
program on your AWware CD of a couple years ago.  Has that been updated
for ext3?  What is the URL for it?  I haven't been able to locate it.

--------------------------------------------
Bruce Smith                bruce@armintl.com
System Administrator / Network Administrator
Armstrong International, Inc.
Three Rivers, Michigan  49093  USA
http://www.armstrong-intl.com/
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