[Wylug-discuss] maintenance

[Mark P. Conmy]

On Sun, 19 Aug 2007, Scott Hodgson wrote:
> 
> hello
>
> I was looking on how to defragment the hard drive of Ubuntu - have always 
> tried to do routine  maintenance - when I saw an article saying Linux doesn't 
> have this problem of fragmenting, could anyone explain this please on how 
> Linux deals with this?  Also is there any routine maintenance I should be 
> doing in Linux specifically Ubuntu?

Precisely how fragmentation is dealt with in more advanced filesystems
is a long (and, for many, boring) story that probably isn't worth
explaining in depth for any (let alone) all types.  The concept of
serious fragmentation was mainly a problem for FAT-style filesystem,
which Unix-like systems got away from a long time ago, MacOS hasn't used
for years and Windows dropped with NTFS (for those who chose it).

Suffice it to say that fragmentation _does_ exist in all filesystems,
but that more advanced designs than FAT (from the Unix fast filesystem
through to log or journal designs) explicitly reduce the problem and
minimise the cost where it does occur.  In some cases, this is by
rewriting the whole entry (at some convenient point) to contiguous
blocks as it gets fragmented rather than leaving it fragmented until the
users initiates a clean-up.

There is little routine maintenance that you _have_ to do (most never
think about it and don't have any problems), though there can be
performance gains to be had in rewriting certain types of data if it is
often enlarged or truncated to ensure that the directories or files
don't end up spread over too large an area.  Precisely how worthwhile
this is depends very much on the situation.

HTH,

Mark