Linux apps vs Windows apps (was Stripped-Down 7.04)

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Mon, 03 Mar 2008, Kemp, Levi wrote:

> I've never even considered this since I started using Linux, but as far
> as installing apps goes since they obviously don't slow the system down
> unless in use what about defragmentation. 

The filesystems generally used on Linux don't usually suffer from
fragmentation.

> I realize the file system is different, and I read that it is a journal
> file system. Does that mean it organizes itself to prevent fragmentation, 

Journaling means before writing changes to the filesystem, it writes
them to a journal in order that the if a power failure or other
interruption occurred mid-write, the server would be able to get the
filesystem back into a clean state, without doing an fsck (unix-speak for
chkdsk) and possibly losing data.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext3

This isn't really directly relevant to the fragmentation issue though.

> or am I missing a needed bit of maintenance? A bit off topic I know but
> you spurred my mind this morning.

In general, there's little need for defragmenting on linux:

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/sag/html/filesystems.html#FRAGMENTATION

Gavin