Here is my small case study on Defrag--- looking comments I have been running Debian unstable for a couple of years now and I had noticed that Disk thrashing is happening more and more. Here was my theory: Debian unstable, running gnome desktop, mythtv, basic apps. /dev/hda1 = ext3 /boot ~100M /dev/hda2 = swap ~1024M /dev/hda3 = ext3 / ~80G / is one partition that is about 80 G a few nfs mounts but only for shared media (archive video/mp3) data and no program or regular program data is stored on them. Mythtv uses the / space for its video data in /var/lib/mythtv (bad design but it would have required a re-arch of the box to change it. That is next on my list of tasks) Due to apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade almost daily and mythtv keeping my 80G HD about 85% full all the time I was beginning to think that even the best file system attempts to keep files from fragmenting were not going to be enough. I started looking into ext2defrag a quite a while ago but didn't really have a way to run it. Downloaded a Knoppix cd and burned it. booted into Knoppix and ran ext2defrag /dev/hda3. Well, either my theory was right or something else was causing it but the drive was _VERY_ fragmented. While no indicators of how fragmented were shown in defrag I watched as it moved blocks around and lined them up and many blocks were being reformed from all over the disk space. I haven't had sufficient time to see if this has helped yet but it did give me a little insight into defragging and Linux file systems. If you are running a fairly extreme case like mine you may want to look into it. *** One word of caution that I didn't see until after I started, (stupid me) but once you start you are committed. You cannot stop the defrag for any reason -c, reboot, power, kernel crash, act of deity, otherwise it will leave your filesystem in a terminally broken state. In other words, do backups and allow ample time (about 4 hours for my 80G Drive) for it to complete. -- Bill Warner --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change you mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss