My co worker is convinced that the ext3 partition hosting our mysql databases needs to be defragmented to improve lookup performance. I understand that fragmentation on ext2/ext3 file systems does not happen nearly as bad as it on fat32 or ntfs file systems. I've been told fragmentation is not a problem at all and ext3 File systems never need to be defragmented. I don't know if I believe that to be the whole truth because fragmentation does occur even if it's not really a big problem. I don't believe defragging this partition is going to make a noticeable difference but I don't really know for sure. The database, although it pretty big & flat, (~4Gig), it's pretty static. Not a lot is added to it. I have not yet run fsck on this partition to find out what the actual non-contiguous file count is. I have to take the box down to do that. Googling on the subject gets me to a lot of lug list archives of people voicing conflicting opinions but not a lot of solid info that was not over my head. I have these questions for you all. 1. Do you think defragging this partition is going to make a noticeable difference in performance? 2. Can anyone point me to any resources that would convince my coworkers that the problem is not the drive, it's the database? 3. Is backing up the partition, deleting it, then restoring the only way to deferment a ext3 partition? 4. is there a way to determine the how contiguous or fragmented one particular file is? Interesting article: http://www.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de/~loizides/reiserfs/agesystem.html -- Tom Penney <blots at visi.com> _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list