From owner-freebsd-questions  Mon Mar 26 13:13:56 2001
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Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2001 16:14:50 -0500
From: Bill Moran <wmoran@iowna.com>
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To: dyu@cdknet.com
Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: defragment...
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dyu wrote:
> 
> hi all,
> 
> I was wondering, is it necessary to defrag my FreeBSD server drives one in a
> while like in Windows?
> if so, what command or software is good?
> thanks,

No, the FFS (the filesystem that FreeBSD uses) defragments itself on the
fly during normal operation and needs no manual defragmentation. There
are (supposedly) some weird usage circumstances where this doesn't work
properly and the filesystem can get pretty disorganized, but this
usually happens only when the filesystem is very close to full. As long
as you keep a good percentage of free space, there's no problem (see
"man tunefs" for more details) If it does get messy and need fixed,
you'll need backup your data, reformat the filesystem and restore to
defrag. This happens pretty seldom and there's really no need for a
defrag tool.
The upshot is that the filesystem doesn't really need any regular
maintenance.
If you're curious about technical details, the file
/usr/share/doc/papers/diskperf.ascii.gz has a really interesting writeup
on how it works.

-Bill

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