Mark Bixby wrote:

> "Sohrt, Jeff" wrote:
> >
> > What are the benefits of Defraging?
>
> One of the benefits is that it will prevent POSIX programs from dying on fork()
> errors due to insufficient contiguous disk free space.

quite true.

mpe seems to get a real performance boost from having well-packed discs.  for
reasons unknown to me (it's *not* my fault, mom! :-), we had quit running our
defrag job on our production machine.  for a vast collection of reasons, we were
having severe performance problems on this box.  i got the defrag job back on the
schedule -- and the difference was impressive.  (just to be clear, the performance
problems *really* went away when the system was upgraded to a 997/400 :-)  but
defragging did make a difference)

afaik, both popular defrag products are stable and reliable.  i run regularily
scheduled defrag jobs on both my big machines.  i don't worry too much about when
they run -- although i do the obvious to not run them during the day when folks are
on the system :-)  the job (in my case) isn't long running but there is a fair
amount of io (duh :-).  if my memory is working this morning, i believe the defrag
job on the production box runs on sunday morning.  there's some load on the system
but everything seems to coexist peacefully.

i think the key is to defrag on a regular basis.  over time, you should expect
successive defrag jobs to run quickly because the discs were in pretty good shape
to begin with.          - d

--
Donna Garverick     Sr. System Programmer
925-210-6631        [log in to unmask]

"Unix _is_ user friendly.
It's just very selective about who its friends are.
And sometimes even best friends have fights."

>>>MY opinions, not Longs Drug Stores'<<<