Why Linux doesn't need a defragmentation tool !?

[Hennen Dirk]

Another Newbie question !

All (ex) M$ Windows users know it. Windows writes data fragmented
to the harddisk , and sometimes makes a real mess of it !
So, now and then we need to run the defragmentation tool, to restore
fragmented data back to order, and speed up system performance again.
Linux doesn't use this tool, Why ??

I've noticed , every 26th boot , LinuxMint start up a general system check-up.
Maybe the defragmentation tool is build-in here !
Let's ask the forum about this ... ???

P.S. Specially for Mr. scorp123 and respect for the forum's netiquette standards, I've used only 3 question marks at the end of my story !
Greetings to all Mint-lovers. I'm glad to be with you !

[ouilsen]

There are tools for defragmentation of ext2 filesystems. But first one has to see that usually defragmentation only results in small performance gains.

And at least for ext2/3 there is a simple rule to avoid defragmentation. Just keep some empty on your partition.

The filesystem check on every xth boot is only a consistency check. If everything is ok, nothing is changed.

[clem]

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=481172

[clem]

Checks every 30 boots, and you can change that with tunefs

Clem

[frank392]

hi ouilsen,
take a look at this:

http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/index. ... ragmenting

[scorp123]

Linux doesn't use this tool, Why ??

UNIX-like OS such as Linux but also the many *BSD variants (OpenBSD, FreeBSD, etc.) try everything they can to write any data in an intelligent way to the disks, e.g. they may reserve the right amount of data for a file that needs to be written in advance before the actual write operation happens. This helps to avoid fragmentation from happening in the first place.

Besides that you're not 100% precise. The modern XFS filesystem for Linux which originates from Silicon Graphics Inc. (sgi) and their IRIX Unix OS does have a xfs-defrag tool called xfs_fsr ... But you rarely rarely rarely will ever need it, because under normal circumstances XFS too will usually try everything it can to avoid fragmentation.

I am not 100% sure anymore about this, but I think that for example XFS auto-optimises itself in the background, you just need to leave the system running. If you're not happy you could still use various xfs-* tools to force a filesystem optimisation even while the filesystem is in use. (read the manuals ....)

Ext3 and ReiserFS try hard to avoid fragmentation from happening by paying attention how they write stuff to the disks in the first place; and even if stuff gets fragmented, they usually arrange all the needed extra-infos (inode tables, superblocks, indexes, and what not) in such a way that all the fragmented bits can be found as efficiently as possible.

So defraggers are really not an issue here on Linux (and the *BSD's).

On commercial UNIX platforms such as HP-UX and Solaris they don't even know what a defrag program is ... they never heard of such a stupid thing