OT: SCO Drive Performance issue

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Apr 10, 2006, D. Thomas Podnar wrote:
>On Mon, Apr 10, 2006 at 04:23:46PM -0400, Doug Luurs wrote:
>> Does anyone have any ideas on improving the performance of SCO (5.0.7)
>> Disk read speed.   Some of our files are getting a 'might' large over
>> time.
>> 
>> Would back-up'g up the filepro system, deleting it, and then restoring
>> it
>> tend to improve it's read access (Defragmenting it) help it any ?
...
>Hi Douglas.
>
>Backing up and then restoring by itself will probably use a lot of
>the same fragmented blocks, and your performance may not change.
>
>Backing up a filesystem, unmounting it, re-creating it (as in divvy),
>then remounting it and retoring your files will breing them back
>contiguously, resulting in improved performance for a while.

I would be very surprised if disk fragmentation were causing performance
issues on SCO OpenServer systems, particularly in a production environment
such as a business/accounting system.

This type of system typically doesn't create/delete large numbers of files
which might lead to fragmentation.  Even in environments such as
development machines where one is continually building software which well
create thousands of temporary files, I've never seen any significant
fragmentation since the days of SCO Xenix, and I don't remember this being
a major problem even then.

Back when we were running usenet news servers on OpenServer, there were
frequent issues with inodes disappearing which would require unmounting the
file systems to run full fscks so that the inode counts would be correct.
This wasn't an issue of fragmentation, but bugs in OpenServer at the time.

Bill
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