On Fri, Mar 01, 2002 at 02:15:24PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote: > In your case, it seems that you have many small files in the same > directory. exactly > I bet the directory itself is fragmented, for the same reason - slow > growth. Did you copy the files at some stage? That would unfrag > the directory. And the inode table. Well, on December 25, 2001, the hard disk that contained my /home partition broke down. Fortunately, it was automatically remounted ro so that I noticed the failure in the morning when fetching my mails, and I could restore everything from the backups after I bought a new disk :) It was an interesting experiance ... Thus, the directory should be mostly unfragmented and only those mails that came after Dec 25 should be affected by fragmentation. > For the above reasons, I partition my machines with all partitions > the same size, and keep one free. For the monthly theraputic > copy-all-files-and-switch-mountpoints speedup. > > It's all a bit sad, really. Hm, I didn't notice effects of fragmentation yet. During the recent years, I occassionally repartitioned my disks when new ones were installed, and some partitions were copied over then. But I didn't do that on a regular basis. GH
