Hi all,

Just starting a thread for this defragmentation stuff.

Helen said:

> BTW, I've found great benefit from running the Windows
> defrag tool TWICE. And defrags are much faster on a
> 7200 disk, as well.

I noticed this recently...
http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Contig.html

It struck me as a potentially useful utility for defrag
of important files - like databases - under Windows. I dont
know if any similar tool exists for *nix systems.

I have noticed that this utility will run even on a database
open with embedded (ie. exclusive access). Is it safe to do
so? I dont know, perhaps the Windows API has tricks to allow
this. My small experimental database did not seem to be
affected by being open during the defrag, but it was not doing
much and I dont want to be the one to discover the hard way in
production that it is not safe. :-)

Whatever the case, it seems to me that a file specific
defragger could often be useful as long as you are careful.

--
Geoff Worboys
Telesis Computing