Re: OS X defrag?
- From: TheLetterK <theletterk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 27 Aug 2005 16:34:57 -0400
Flint wrote:
I doubt you'd lose any if you stopped defragging at such insane intervals. You don't lose 3% performance with 3% fragmentation. It's not a linear correlation.TheLetterK wrote:
Flint wrote:
TheLetterK wrote:
Flint wrote:
TheLetterK wrote:
Flint wrote:
Peter Hayes wrote:
TravelinMan <Nowhere@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <1121796599.850435.250450@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
pstone67dog@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Why is there no OS X defrag software on the market? I knew Macs had
less software than Windows, but c'mon... that's ridiculous. That's just
basic.
--pstone
It's not needed. I've never seen any significant slowdown with OS X.
And I can show you a Mac that that doesn't get used heavily.
But if you really want to defragment, you can use TechTool Pro. There
are probably others (Symantec used to have one), as well.
In the same way you don't have to defrag any other Unix-fs, like ext2/3,
reiser-fs, jfs, etc,
*Any* OS can benefit from defragging.
I'd like to hear you justify this comment.
No you wouldn't.
Yes, actually. I'm always willing to be corrected. But I don't see how you can justify your comments here.
You're just another maccie fanatic looking for an argument and taking a ridiculous position that OS X is the be all end all that has solved a fundamental problem that all filesystems have in common (to varying degrees), but are just too much of a SJ disciple to admit it.
Oh right. This is why I complain about OS X, blast Apple for poor decisions regarding it's design, and advocate Linux far more than I do OS X? Disk management and maintanence is something OS X handles very well, so well I can't even find fault with it.
If you'll note, most of the 'maccies' around here have called me an 'MS shill' and 'Linux zealot'. With most of the Linux zealots and MS shills calling me 'Mac fanatic' and whatever suits their opposing side. Make up your damn minds people.
I don't care if it's OS X or not. If you write a bunch of files to a drive, and delete a lot files under a typically heavy usage, you *will* and *do* have fragmentation to some degree - it's a simple *fact*.
Not when you do certain kinds of disk optimization on-the-fly, like OS X does. OS X caches *all* disk writes such that it can place them in contiguous segments when possible. When idle, it shuffles files around such that they are more contiguous. When reading, it aggressively pre-caches what it can to reduce the impact of any fragmentation that does occur. Additionally, OS X avoids writing to recently freed space when at all possible.
You'd essentially have to do a bunch of 20MB+ file creation and deletion with less than a gig of space left on the drive to really encounter fragmentation issues on OS X. It's a bad idea to run with less than a gig anyway because of VM issues.
even NTFS doesn't need regular defragging.
Baloney... it needs defragging too. It just needs it far less than FAT filesystems.
It's only good old fashioned FAT that needs defragging.
This is pure nonsense.
I don't give a rat's arse what OS/filesystem is used. If it is used to write files, then delete them, or stores temp data, or writes/modifies envirnmental variable data to disk, etc., it can benefit from some form of defragging.
Again, explain. This is true for windows--but not systems that perform certain types of on-the-fly disk maintanence, and exercise sanity when writing out to disk.
Oh yes, and next you'll be telling us how OS X can intelligently predict how a user is going to use their system.
No, but it does a pretty good job of predicting what's going to be read from disk next.
Have you ever seen what a Protools user can do to a hard disk in a recording session? When you do, then we can continue this discussion. Until then, you need to understand that your usage obviously does not tax your system to any great extent, and you are simply unaware of how fragmentation occurs, and that OS X's disk write 'sanity' can be taxed just like any other system, and that on the fly optimizations only go so far.
It's on-the-fly *defragging* of files under 20MiB. OS X moves them around into contiguous sections when idle. It also moves commonly used files to faster portions of the disk *on-the-fly*.
And on a laptop, your battery life suffers as a result from it.
I don't think it does when on battery power.
This may not be a major issue when operating off of a PSU brick, but it is an issue when you're operating on battery alone.
You are aware that OS X operates differently when on battery power, right?
That and it does it's damnedest to pre-cache everything, far more aggressively than most systems. It also delays writing out to disk as long as it can to do all that's possible to keep the data contiguous. Unless you specifically try to fragment the disk, it shouldn't get fragmented. Ever.
Or if you are using a disk intensive application like multitrack audio recording.
This doesn't seem to be a problem in Mac user groups.
But to be fair about it, this type of application will tax any filesystem/OS to a degree.
So Maccies think that doing backups is a waste of time? Gotcha...
Well, actually, doing backups in the way you suggest *is* a waste of time.
Applications get added and removed from my system disk all the time. Doing a ghost backup/restore *is* the most efficient way to simultaneously backup *and* defrag at the same time. Takes all of 12 minutes once a week or so. The efficiency of this scheme *was* my point.
There's no reason to continually update that which has already been updated.
Yes there is. It can be more efficient to do a partition level backup on a regular basis that can be *scheduled* so as to not interfere with other scheduled processes/events, or exact a performance penalty while trying to do something else, and it only takes a few minutes a week at the most, and be made transparent to the user. Doing regular system level backups is far less intensive with less wear and tear on your drive than dynamic on-the-fly schemes.
So, it's faster for you to backup everything than it is to backup just a week's changes? What on earth are these systems doing? Noone said anything about on-the-fly backups. You don't have to sync every minute of every day. Once a week, backup only the changes made in the last week of use. You've got less of a chance to lose data, don't congest your network with a lot of mostly useless traffic, and shouldn't put as much wear on the disks this way. There's no reason to backup 'system.map' 4 dozen times a year if it never changes.
As for my other points about using a separate partitions for exclusive use of a swapfile/pagefile, and temp data, I'm surprised that you being a linux user don't seem to be aware of it, or see the value in it.
I don't recall commenting on it--though technically the requirement for swap partitions doesn't exist after kernel 2.6. Linux 2.6 handles swap files as well as it does swap partitions. Since it won't get fragmented by that type of usage, there's little reason to be using swap partitions anymore. Historical reasons, I suppose.
*Syncing* is the ideal solution. Backup only the changes
since the previous backup.
There are different methods or schemes of backing up. Syncing (incremental) works great for backing up user *data* files, but not for your OS drive/boot disk where programs/apps may be dynamically added/removed.
Debian has had a framework in place to do this for *eons*. Network installation with systems like that make anything but incremental backups a waste of time.
Syncing is only *one* method, and should be part of an overall backup scheme. Like I said before, apps get added and removed,
This might be the case with Windows, but with a little thought there's no reason to be wasting your time doing this.
and wholesale changes can occur on your system disk where fragmentation is unavoidable, *period*, even on a Mac.
I don't see how you can cause fragmentation on a system that goes out of it's way to cache disk writes until it can put the data in a contiguous portion of the disk. And I don't see why the fragmentation would matter on a system that pre-caches as much as OS X does. That's not considering the background defragging.
Even if you only have 3% fragmentation, that's still too high for me. For my use, and the way I use my systems, I prefer more direct control over how I deal with fragmentation, and try to keep fragmentation down to below less than *1%* as much as possible.
Why? This level of fragmentation has no impact on performance whatsoever.
The end result is I *consistantly* have optimal performance due to a more comprehensive backup/defragging scheme.
Yes, your probably saving a non-zero amount of time through all this,
"Saving" time isn't the issue, not _losing_ any time is.
but I don't think you end up with a performance gain by the end of the day.
You're right, I don't end up with a performance _gain_ - I just don't *lose* any performance.
All that aside, Windows has some pretty good defraggers for it that can be set up to automate much of this as well, but can be more finely tuned to individual user needs. There may be less of a need to do so on a Mac for most Mac users, but to just summarilly dismiss the value of doing so, or to say that there is no real benefit to doing the same on a Mac is just plain absurd - *that* was my point.
Can you point me to a single Mac running Panther that needs to be defragged?
Yes I can - a buddy's G3 tower w/dual 80GB IBM/Hitachi PATA drives heavily used in a Protools HD equipped recording studio with moderate fragmentation, and he's got fairly *large* .wav files (>100MB ea.)
Try defragging it and compare the performance.
I don't do any defragging on OS X whatsoever. Performance doesn't decrease because of it either.
Hell, I'll make it easy on you, find a Jaguar box. They hadn't implemented on-the-fly defragging then. By all means, run whatever real-world tests you'd like. Noone else seems to be finding a problem here,
Nor am I.
and all the literature and documentation regarding this 'issue' seems to indicate that it isn't a problem on OS X. The burden of proof is on you. Show us an example.
I have no burden of proof whatsoever. I'm simply advocating one form of fragmentation management over another. To be honest, *I* don't care for Windows defragmenter either, but then I don't use it because I never need to as I employ a defrag scheme that is fast and easy.
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