slouder%pernod@note.nsf.gov (Steve Loudermilk) (01/31/89)
Reply-to: slouder%pernod@note.nsf.gov (Steve Loudermilk) I am involved in a local discussion about the benefits of "compacting" the information on our disks regularly. By compacting I mean dumping to a different device, running "newfs" and then restoring a file system. One school of thought says this is necessary and should be done fairly frequently to avoid excessive fragmentation and inefficient disk I/O. The other school of thought says it isn't necessary because of the way the Berkeley "fast file system" (BSD 4.2) handles assignment of blocks and fragments when a file is stored. Our system is a Vax 11/785 with six ra81 disk drives, running Ultrix 2.3. We are currently using a block size of 8192 and a frag size of 1024 for all file systems except one, where we have 4096/1024. All file systems are running with at least 12% free space. Should I worry about fragmentation? If so, is dumping and restoring the best solution? Thanks in advance, ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Steve Loudermilk Internet: slouder@note.nsf.gov Integrated Microcomputer Systems Inc. Phonenet: (202) 357-9648 ----------------------------------------------------------------------