Ext3 does need a defragger
 

Straight off the bat - I hate Linux **.
Sorry, but I do...
Unfortunately I have to administer quite a few machines that use it.

I'm currently dealing with one machine that keeps grinding to a halt on file intensive operations such as backups or archive creation.
fsck lets you know the fragmentation status of the devices it's checking, and of the 4 1Tb drives in this particular system, the least fragmented was 8%, the most 37%.

If that isn't a system in need of a good defrag I've never seen one.
Average freespace on each drive? 40%


All OSs suffer from problems, Windows more than most (although I'm really happy with the current one).
What really drives me up the wall with Linux is this unassailable smugness of its devotees!

The 'Well if you can't be bothered to learn all 256 command line switches for programX and how they all interact with each other, then how can you possibly expect us to even consider helping you out?' attitude, or the 'Linux was created by Gods, therefore the problem you are having is not a problem' attitude is exactly why so many people posting for help with Linux problems feel the need to add "And please don't tell me that......." to their posts.

This particular machine is in a business environment, it needs defragging. There is NO way that I have stumbled across he one & only machine in this state.
Do not tell people there is no business requirement for defragging ext3 drives.

All I need is 'defrag -F' like 'fsck -F'
Does it exist? Apparently not.
Why? Because that would be admitting the need...

** Because of the attitudes of the community, not because of the OS itself.


P.S. - If you want a good example of what I mean (other than this thread), look into how to lock the screen when logged in as root...

Do you feel better now? :rolleyes:

If you want help don't latch onto a thread that really stopped being useful years ago, start your own. :twocents:

As you said, "business requirements." Every operating system ... heck, almost every computer ... is out there to fulfill exactly such requirements. Typecasting any one of them, or their user community, is simply pointless.

If your system is "grinding to a halt," fragmentation is not too likely to be the true cause of it. I suggest that you look more closely at the I/O configuration to make certain how both I/O requests and data are actually distributed among the drives and that you in all other ways know precisely what the nature of the bottleneck is. Although you very confidently assert that "If that isn't a system in need of a good defrag I've never seen one," there are a great many red herrings in these waters. Every assumption that you actually choose to act upon should be proved.

And... let's just leave "personalities" out of it, because quite frankly it's just not there anyway. (That's just empty media talk.) This is "all about business," for all of us and for all of the operating systems that we all use on a daily basis.

Moderator response
 

Hi,

Welcome to LQ!
First, please re-read LQ Rules; You should not resurrect a dead thread, especially when you do not have anything constructive to present. I moved your post to a new thread. Hopefully we can have a good on going informational exchange.

Now, you come to the Linux-General forum and bait with the statement "I hate Linux **". Please do not troll or try to incite within this forum. You have every right to your opinion but let us get the facts straight. Please look at 'ext3' to get a better understanding.

Then look at 'Linux File System';
Once you have reviewed the material then we could possibly help you find out why you feel the system(s) are at fault.

Please read the links and maybe we can speak at the same level & terms.

I will be watching! :)

Some Linux file system have "automatic" fragmentation control built-in, some don't. For example, btrfs contains many improvements to the ext family of file systems including fragmentation control and volume spanning.

Even ext4 would be a better choice the the (obsolescent) ext3 you're apparently using on TB drives. (The ext4 allocation scheme reduces the fragmentation when compared to ext3, and the conversion of an ext3 fs to ext4 is fairly easy. [Of course, you should do it on a spare drive first. But you knew that.]) :)

That's too bad, because that means I'm not gonna help you. Go use Window$, which I'm sure you love, you troll.

Wow, you're right! I'm dumping all my *nix systems and converting to Windows.

Before you criticise a system, it does help to know a bit about it. ext3 grew up in the world of small storage; even wikipedia knows it's not suited to heavy usage of 1Tb drives.

On the other hand, XFS and JFS are exactly the sort of thing you need. To give an example: When the BBC used Windows, TV cameras recorded on tape as the filing system couldn't cope with the volume of output from multiple cameras. So they switched to Linux and the XFS system. If that can cope with the simultaneous output of half a dozen HD cameras, it could certainly cope with anything you could throw at it.

You don't mention what hardware you've got these 4 TB drives hanging from, so I don't know how anyone can comment on the speed ("grinding to a halt").
I would have thought that it would be quicker and easier to back up everything on to a different machine or drive, then make a new fs (ext4 for preference) and copy the stuff back, after checking for bad sectors.

I'm speaking out of ignorance here, I've never had a seriously fragmented filesystem with Linux (said smugly).

Last time I defragmented, with Windows of course, it was an all-night affair for a few hundred MB. Of course that was a long time ago, but perish the thought of defragging a terrorbite.

Disk access is inherently fragmented.
Smugness? You post here complaining about smugness, when your opening line is: "I hate Linux"???
There isn't, but in your case there is a business requirement to use something better than ext3. What you are doing is clearly beyond the capabilities of ext3. As suggested above, you need to be using XFS or JFS. These are industrial quality filesystems written by the likes of Sun and IBM to handle industrial strength loads. Heck, I use XFS on my desktop because even at that level I find that it knocks the socks off ext3.
The ext* filesystems have been around for over 20 years. If they really needed a defragging tool, someone, somewhere would have written one by now.