[olug] Anyone defragging their linux servers?

[Christopher Cashell]

On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 9:29 AM, Ryan Stille <ryan at cfwebtools.com> wrote:
> Our servers are nothing like that, they are low use web servers.
> Should I be concerned about defragging?  It doesn't even look like there
> is a practical way to do it if I wanted to.

The article you referenced is actually one of the better ones I know,
and I've pushed people towards that a number of times.  It does a very
good job of explaining why fragmentation isn't a major concern with
ext3.

As has been pointed out, ext3 is designed in such a way that it is
inherently very resistant to fragmentation.  The only time
fragmentation will typically become an issue is if you routinely run
your filesystem at capacity.  Also note that by default, when an ext3
filesystem is created, 5% of it's capacity is set aside as reserved
space.  This space can only be accessed by the root user, and gives
the filesystem an extra buffer of free space for preventing fragmented
files.

Unless you have specific performance issues, defragmentation is
completely unnecessary.  Most of the time, defragmenting ext3 is as
likely to cause more problems as it is to improve anything.  There's a
lot of important maintenance that should be performed on production
computers, but trying to generalize across completely different
platforms and do maintenance on one just because it's required on
another is a bad idea.

> Thanks,
> -Ryan

-- 
Christopher