I'd recently been running into performance issues with my combined frontend/backend. Menu's were slow, hard disk access was slow, and in general it felt sluggish. When the system was new it did not have these problems. Recordings and videos are stored on a pair of 250 gig IDE drives, running in a striped LVM configuration with XFS. They're on different IDE channels as well, so performance really shouldn't be an issue.
<br><br>I decided to check the fragmentation on the drive, and xfs_db told me that it was over 98%. I deleted some recordings that we'd already watched to free up a bunch of space (114 gigs free space, actually), and ran xfs_fsr in an infinite loop for a couple of days. I got fragmentation under 3%, and the system is much improved. I've copied over some new video files and some shows have been recorded, so fragmentation has increased from that low again, but is still under 20%. My room mate reports that the system is "3000 percent better." While that's probably a bit of an exaggeration, it is certainly much more responsive, and the hard disks don't seem to thrash so much when loading the recordings listing. I've set up a cron script to run one pass of xfs_fsr each night, so hopefully we can keep the performance gain for a little while.
<br><br>root@sixball:~# xfs_db -r /dev/mythtv/mythmedia<br>xfs_db> frag<br>actual 3904, ideal 3191, fragmentation factor 18.26%<br>xfs_db> quit<br><br>I just thought I'd share this with the list, and ask if anyone else has encountered significant performance loss due to disk fragmentation? How fragmented are your drives?
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