Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto wrote:
[...] what would be the best way to defrag it?
By not defragging it.
[...]
I don't buy into that argument and never did. Every few months I copy the whole HD to another one and then back to counter fragmentation (ext3) and
the system becomes noticeably faster after doing it (speed increase in
emerge --sync for example.) Maybe it's not fragmentation but rather related
files being more closely together after I do this.
How exactly do you copy the files?  [...]
I simply boot from the Gentoo DVD and rsync to another ext3 partition, 
wipe the current filesystem and then rsync back.
OK, I once again verified that fragmentation seems to be a big issue 
even on Linux.  I just migrated to ext4, and in order to do that I had 
to rsync, format and rsync back.  The result is similar to the last time 
I did this (over 8 months ago):
emerge --sync takes 15 seconds (at least 3 minutes yesterday)
update-eix takes 2 seconds (20 seconds yesterday)

And I don't believe it's due to ext4. It's a nice speed-up from ext3, but not THAT nice.

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