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Re: [Mldonkey-users] Feature requst - download cache
From: |
Brett Dikeman |
Subject: |
Re: [Mldonkey-users] Feature requst - download cache |
Date: |
Fri, 14 Mar 2003 21:37:58 -0500 |
At 12:48 PM +0100 3/14/03, address@hidden wrote:
> I realy get fed up by all the fragmentation and thus slowdown of the
fs mldonkey generates.
This isn't mldonkey. It's a lack of disk space on your part.
Without defragmenting now and then it reaches a
> critical point where the disk speed is below the download speed.
This is simply not possible- you must be getting swapping, which is
entirely different. Check your swap rate using vmstat during this
disk activity, I can practically guarantee it's swap.
If you have an IDE drive, have youenabled DMA, unmasked IRQs, 32bit
IO, and the fastest IDE mode your drive/controller supports? These
can cause -significant- improvements in disk IO on some systems. A
Dell system I used to use at work improved almost 30x in disk
benchmarks for sequential reads.
You can also enable write caching, if your system is rock solid
stable; I strongly recommend you at least switch to ext3, however, to
reduce chances of filesystem corruption if the system does crash/get
powered down accidentally(note, it is possible to jump between ext2
and 3, you do not need to reformat- google for something like "ext2
ext3 tunefs".)
Also, I'm not sure of what you mean by "without degramenting now and
then"- the ext2 defrag utility is pretty much dead. Is there some
new utility out?
or use a filesystem without such drawbacks.
Uh, no. Regardless of what operating system you use, if you've got
next to no disk space available, you're going to get fragmentation,
and there's nothing you can do about it. Yes, FAT and NTFS are much
worse than others, but the unix and MacOS filesystems are much
better, and ext2 doesn't suffer the same problems as FAT/NTFS, so
comparing them is absurd.
Fact of life; statistically, the less free space, the less of a
chance the OS will be able to find contiguous disk space. Some
filesystems are more clever than others, but the differences are not
astounding, certainly not the "30x" claimed by one lister- that was
due to the reformat(which, after you've copied all your data back,
results in a completely unfragmented filesystem), -NOT- the
filesystem type switch!
Brett
PS:most journaling filesystems are at least slightly slower than
non-journaling systems. We're not talking a drastic or even
noticeable difference, however, so don't loose sleep over it.
--
----
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Ben Franklin
http://www.users.cloud9.net/~brett/