Not knowing how your disks and server are configured makes this a little 
hard to trouble shoot.  You said you have the database on a partition.  
Do you have the OS on  a different partition? What is in the database 
that is making is slow?

Perform a full backup first.
Copy the database to a different physical drive that's blank and point 
SQL to it. 
If performance improves enough to notice, then you have several options.
    If performance does not improve you need to look at removing bad data.
Delete the original database, defragment the disk, copy the image from 
the blank drive.
Defragment the disk with the original database on it.
Leave the database on it's own drive and delete the old, this is really 
the best choice if you can do it.

With databases I like a configuration where the OS and applications are 
on a Raid 5 set.  I like databases on mirror sets with their own 
controller.  Again, not knowing you hardware makes it tough.

Fat32 fragments because is sucks.  NTFS is better but it still 
fragments. I've never had an issue with ext2 and I don't run ext3 so I 
don't know what to tell you about them.

Sam.

Tom Penney wrote:

>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
>
>  
>


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