<div dir="ltr"><br><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">
Thought I should start a new thread on this question. I am having problems with my older Myth 0.21 system running on Mythbuntu 8.04. It has EXT3 file systems. It was suggested that my problem could be solved by defragmenting the drives.<div>
<br></div><div>How do you measure fragumention level?</div><div>How do you defragment? Can it even be done? I see that the latest Mythbuntu install uses EXT4, which apparently has defrag built in.</div></blockquote><div>
<br></div><div style>To check fragmentation, see the link below.</div><div><br></div><div style>There is no Ext3 defrag tool that works on the filesystem level... but there are lots of ways to take advantage of the filesystem's method of preventing fragmentation.</div>
<div style><br></div><div style>Essentially, if the file system has enough space to hold an entire file, it will reserve this space during the write. Unfortunately because recordings grow rather than being written whole, they can often become fragmented because the file system cannot reserve space to hold the entire file.</div>
<div style><br></div><div style>To "defrag" the file, simply create a copy of it and delete the original. This only works well if the drive is not very full because there may not be enough contiguous free space to hold the new file in a filesystem that is nearly full, or was recently full with streamed data like recordings.</div>
<div style><br></div><div style>Even better would be to move all of your recordings to an external drive, then move them back.</div><div style><br></div><div style>Finally you can automate this 'defrag' with something like shake: <a href="http://www.webupd8.org/2009/10/defragmenting-linux-ext3-filesystems.html">http://www.webupd8.org/2009/10/defragmenting-linux-ext3-filesystems.html</a> which ultimately does something very similar to the above file copy.</div>
<div style><br></div><div style><br></div></div></div></div>