On Sat, 2005-12-31 at 03:12, Tim wrote: > Unless fragmentation on ext3 file systems is a problem, and I've no > evidence to the contrary, then it doesn't matter how the data is put on > the drive. All you have to do is look at the seek time on a disk drive compared to any other computer operation to see what the effect will be if a file that is normally read sequentially is broken into non-contiguous chunks. However aside from the effort the system makes to avoid doing that, the real reason you don't often notice the problem in practice is that frequently-accessed files always live in cache so if you read a file often you only take the speed hit once - and if you don't read it often it probably doesn't matter. Writes also always go through cache and sensible operating systems will sort the write-back into seek order to avoid threshing the head around in the process. So, if you think you have a speed problem caused by your disk, the quick fix is normally to add more RAM. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
