On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 12:17 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote: > On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 04:02, Hans Kristian Rosbach wrote: > > > I would like to see an open-source defragmenter for ext3, if > > just for those worst-case scenarios. Fragmentation CAN happen, > > so there is a need for some. > > There's always backup/mkfs/restore. If you aren't prepared > to restore you should probably take care of that before > worrying about efficiency. Do you know how long time it would take to put back 800GB of mailboxes on our mailserver from the tape backup? No customers in the world would allow us to actually take such a time-off from serving their mail. Granted we COULD set up another box with a 1TB raid5 array to hold the data temporarily, but it would still take time since we would still have to shut down mail services before taking a copy. It would still be a bad workaround for a real problem. (Yes I know that ~99% of us don't ever need it) Thus we would need an on-line defragmenter that we could set up for a low-prio night run once or twice a year. -HK
