Re: [Mldonkey-users] Feature requst - download cache

[Brett Dikeman]

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.
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