Re: [gentoo-user] Anybody tried shake defragmenter?

[Mike Kazantsev <mk.fraggod@gmail.com>]

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On Tue, 4 Aug 2009 11:26:26 -0700
Grant <emailgrant@gmail.com> wrote:

> >> Yeah, that's when I'm hearing the HD access I didn't hear before.
> >>  I run miro and it's downloading several torrents all the time.
> >>  It never made a sound before, but now there's a rhythmic grinding
> >> sound when miro is running, maybe because the HD is more full now.
> >>  Could shake help with this?  To find out, should I be running it
> >> on the partially downloaded torrents?
> >
> > Well, bittorent does not download in sequential order, so it is
> > constantly doing random reads and writes. You may not be able to
> > avoid the HD grinding during this kind of activity. Download to a
> > RAM drive or SSD or something perhaps.

Note that this problem can also be (easily?) solved on software level by
pre-allocating files (like "dd if=/dev/zero of=file").

Sure, that won't make writes sequential, but that should guarantee that
resulting file would be as non-fragmented as fs allows at a time of
it's creation.

In fact, rtorrent (and libtorrent) seem to have such a feature, prehaps
other clients should have it somewhere, as well.

http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/ticket/460


> Is there any tool available to show which files are being written to
> any any given time?  iotop is great for watching the I/O rate and
> which process is responsible, but sometimes I wonder which files are
> being written.  For example, miro is showing a constant 3.5Mbps write
> in iotop, and I only have 50kbps downloading and 30kbps uploading.
> I'd really like to know what is being written to.

Check out sys-fs/inotify-tools (need inotify enabled in kernel).


-- 
Mike Kazantsev // fraggod.net

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