High reproducable fragmentation on ext2

Jim Nance (jlnance@sailboat.mis.uncwil.edu)
Fri, 9 Jul 1999 23:53:24 -0400

Hello all,
I know that ext2 is supposed to be resistant to fragmentation, but
I have found a way to fragment it pretty bad, and its not a contrived
setup. When I build mozilla, I compile it in its own partition (ie. the
source is on one partition and the .o, .a, and executables are on another)
I start with that partition empty, and when I have finished building here
is what I end up with:

Bessie> /sbin/e2fsck -f /dev/hda3
e2fsck 1.14, 9-Jan-1999 for EXT2 FS 0.5b, 95/08/09
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
Pass 2: Checking directory structure
Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity
Pass 4: Checking reference counts
Pass 5: Checking group summary information
/dev/hda3: 5026/280576 files (24.1% non-contiguous), 333617/1118880 blocks

I assume the 24.1% is the fragmentation, and I assume this is high. Anyway,
I think this is using the default block size. I believe I tried this with 4K
blocks once and the problem went away.

Hopefully someone will find this interesting.

Thanks,

Jim

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