[Tfug] Defragging *nix

[Tim Ottinger]

My experience is that I suffered a lot less from fragmentation (back in
windows days) if I took over the swap and made it fixed-length.  That's a
long time ago.  The fact that swap is a separate *partition*, and that ext3
is much more efficient than NTFS and FAT (try doing a find, for example)
means that I don't have as much fragmentation and wouldn't notice it as much
if I did. :-)

Back in the old unix days, they would back up a partition to tape with tar
or the like, wipe and recreate the file system, and then use tar to copy
files back from th etape.  It would rewrite all the files in contiguous
blocks and "defrag" the hard way.  It was seldom necessary.  I had forgotten
about it until just now.  It did seem to speed up some really heavily used
crappy drives back before Ext3 and other modern file systems.

Ah, it's hard being old.

Tim