Uttered Michal Zeravik <michalz@xxxxxxxxxxx>, spake thus: > My boottime fsck shows about 3.4% of fragmented files on / ext3 partition. > It's quite a lot, isn't it? Well, It's over an half year, but... > Chris Jones wrote: > >As a long-time user of various Windoze "distro's" (from win3.11 all the > >way to Win2k), I have come to recognise that one needs to regularly > >de-frag hard-disks under windoze. > > > >My question is:- > >Is linux susceptible to fragmentation? Linux handles "fragmented" files just fine, thanks to the effort in the kernel to properly handle disk caching. By definition, blocks in Linux files are not contiguous on the disk. However, EXT2/EXT3 does make some attempts at leaving some extra free space at the end of a file, just in case it later needs to be extended. However, be aware that the "fragmentation" report you get with the fsck(8) program isn't the type of fragmentation you may be thinking of. Under UNIX and/or Linux, this filesystem fragmentation refers to the percentage of tiny files that were able to be stored in partially-used disk block allocations for other files. Cheers!
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