My co worker is convinced that the ext3 partition hosting our mysql
databases needs to be defragmented to improve lookup performance. I
understand that fragmentation on ext2/ext3 file systems does not happen
nearly as bad as it on fat32 or ntfs file systems. I've been told
fragmentation is not a problem at all and ext3 File systems never need
to be defragmented. I don't know if I believe that to be the whole truth
because fragmentation does occur even if it's not really a big problem.

I don't believe defragging this partition is going to make a noticeable
difference but I don't really know for sure. The database, although it
pretty big & flat, (~4Gig), it's pretty static. Not a lot is added to
it. I have not yet run fsck on this partition to find out what the
actual non-contiguous file count is. I have to take the box down to do
that.

Googling on the subject gets me to a lot of lug list archives of people
voicing conflicting opinions but not a lot of solid info that was not
over my head. 

I have these questions for you all.
1. Do you think defragging this partition is going to make a noticeable
difference in performance?
2. Can anyone point me to any resources that would convince my coworkers
that the problem is not the drive, it's the database? 
3. Is backing up the partition, deleting it, then restoring the only way
to deferment a ext3 partition?
4. is there a way to determine the how contiguous or fragmented one
particular file is?

Interesting article:
http://www.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de/~loizides/reiserfs/agesystem.html

-- 
Tom Penney <blots at visi.com>


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