On Fri, 2005-12-30 at 18:27 -0600, Mike McCarty wrote: > > I don't want to spend the time necessary to try to devise a test. > I possibly could, though it would take some study of the file system, > and might require mods to the file system. I don't know. Hi Mike, I'm not trying to be rude. I'm just interested in the performance aspect. And in terms of a test, imagine: 1) create an ext3 filesystem on an empty partition 2) mount it 3) copy some files (including executables) into it 4) measure how fragmented the resulting files are 5) measure how quickly one can read and/or execute the files 6) delete and/or add some more files (try to fragment them!) 7) unmount the filesystem (to clear any caching) 8) goto (2) which should, after a few cycles, result in measurements of file read and execute times for files with varying amounts of fragmentation. Ed -- Edward H. Hill III, PhD office: MIT Dept. of EAPS; Rm 54-1424; 77 Massachusetts Ave. Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 emails: eh3@xxxxxxx ed@xxxxxxx URLs: http://web.mit.edu/eh3/ http://eh3.com/ phone: 617-253-0098 fax: 617-253-4464