I've never had to defrag an ext2/3 partition. I'm also not running a 4GB database either though. you might try iostat (part of sysstat package) to see if disk io is really an issue. Also look at top at the same time to see if the box is hitting memory (shift+M to sort my memory) and/or cpu (shift+P to sort by cpu) limits when the database performance is a problem. another thing to do would be to try see if a specific query is causing the problem. Alot of times some poorly written sql is to blame for poor performance. Joins on large tables or joins on too many tables will really slow things down. you could try adding and "explain" to a query to see what it's actually doing in mysql. 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 > > -- > 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 -- scot _______________________________________________ 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