Re: e2defrag

[Stan Hoeppner <stan@hardwarefreak.com>]

Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. put forth on 2/3/2010 9:29 AM:

> No such file in stable, backports, testing, unstable, or experimental.
> 
> I've never heard of such a utility, either.

I think I found what happened to it:

http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2006-December/030918.html

> It should be noted that fragmentation is less of an issue on ext2/3/4 file 
> systems than on vfat file systems.

Its fragmentation performance in relation to vfat is irrelevant.  Read the works
of the folks at MIT who wrote EXT2.  It *will* fragment over time, just not
quite as bad as some other "modern" filesystems.  The worst fragmentation
scenario is appending large files over time.  And guess what I have stored on
one of my EXT2 filesystems?  Yes, you guessed it, mbox files.  I keep all my
mail, all list mail, including debian-user, in mbox files (dovecot).  They're
only a combined 200MB at this point, but they will only continue to grow, and
continue to become more fragmented.  Thus, I started looking for a defrag tool
for EXT2.  It appears that Debian removed it from the distro for fear that ppl
would use it on EXT3/4 filesystems and corrupt them as e2defrag only works on
EXT2.  It's apparently not been updated to work with the journals and other data
structures of EXT3/4.

Luckily I've got a dedicated /home partition where these mbox files are stored.
 So worst case scenario I can just create a new XFS partition in my unallocated
space and move everything over.  XFS has a non-destructive online defragger, and
it's a superior filesystem to EXT2/3/4, Resiser, and JFS anyway.  ;)  Matter of
fact XFS has some really nice management tools, light years ahead of EXT2/3/4
and Reiser.

I love having so many good choices available to solve a (potential) problem.

-- 
Stan