Joined: Aug 13, 2004 Posts: 335 Location: Maysville, KY
Posted: Mon Sep 11, 2006 4:58 am Post subject: shake up your files for speed increases.....
It is generally known that defragmentation in linux is not required, for the simple fact that the operating system itself and the format of the partitions usually do their jobs very efficiently. However, a recent post in the gentoo forums brought about a scenerio I had never thought about......and I will explain here:
When you write a file (save) in a linux partition, linux writes the file starting with the first available block that has enough free space to write the file in succession - resulting in no fragments. But what happens if you are running low on disk space and there is not enough free blocks to write the file without defragmentaition? Well, two options are availalbe - don't write the file at all or write the file in a fragmented state. Then if the file is ever re-written, we can attempt to write the file again unfragmented. Seems logical, and you know that linux will always follow the second choice to write the file fragmented in the event there is not enough free space to write the file unfragmented.
Many of us have hard drives that borderline being full, due to the number of applications we have installed, or maybe because we didn't chose an optimal partitioning scheme, or maybe simply because we don't have the money to buy a new hard drive. Obviously then, we probably have a lot of files that exist in a fragmented state.
You should read the article at the gentoo forums and see if shake will benefit you - if you are one of the people running low on hard drive space, or low on space within a partition, or you are working on a linux system that has been working for years.....shake will probably benefit you.
Shake is available as source code, and also there is a gentoo ebuild.
Try it out....this is really a great new application but be forwarned, its under development and may cause you to lose data....so always make sure you have a backup of important files before running shake.
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