Any tools to clean/defragment hard drive for fc10?

[bobo60]

hi,

i was just wondering are there any tools available to clean/defragment my hard drive? im running x86_64, FC10, firefox 3.0.6.

[oz]

Linux file systems generally don't suffer from fragmentation. I've been running Linux for 8 or 9 years now and have never needed to defragment.

[Roxoff]

You might see fragmentation if you're not using a normal linux filesystem - for instance if your system is running on fat32 filesystem.

Under normal conditions, if you're running ext2, ext3 or ext4 filesystems (as ozar says) you wont see any fragmentation that will degrade the performance of your system - disk blocks are allocated in a very smart manner. I have been running Linux systems for 14 years; I've yet to defrag a Linux filesystem, and my servers have up-times measured in years.

[bobo60]

ok. thanks for the info. its just, my system seems to be running alittle sluggish at times. i only built this computer about 4 months ago, and the processor is 2ghz, with 1gb memory, and 500 gb hd. i did install IES4linux about a month ago, and tho its not stable at times, it does work. maybe IES4linux is causing the system to slow down at times? well, ill keep an eye on it...thanks...bob

[elija]

The quick way to see what's happening is to open a terminal and run the command "top". This will show you the most intensive tasks that are running.

My bet will be some kind of indexing service running in the background

[bobo60]

elija,

thanks for the info. i ran "top" and the only thing i see, is my memory might be getting close to the max. the total memory is 894072k, and 817544k is being used. would this slow down the performance? i could put another 1gb stick of memory in. would that help???..bob

[MikeTbob]

This is normal for Linux systems, technically you are not out of RAM but rather the system is keeping it in use until it's needed. When your system gets to the point of low RAM, it will start sending things to the swap partition in order to free up some RAM.

[elija]

When you run top with the applications you use a lot open are you getting a lot of swap used?

If so that would slow things down and it could be worth upping the ram. If you are not using swap a lot I wouldn't bother with more.

[bobo60]

this is what swap looks like;

Swap: 1802232k total, 4k used, 1802228k free,

doesnt look like swap is being used hardly at all...bob

[Roxoff]

Swap wont get used very much if you've got 1GB memory. My desktop machines running Fedora have this much memory, and never swap. Even my CentOS web server never uses its swap partition, it has 1.2(ish)GB of memory but runs a web and mail server, which I'd have expected to be more memory intensive.