Defraggler extremely slow

[Danno]

Thanks for the extra info. We are still looking into this issue, but are unable to recreate it on any of our test machines, but we will not give up

 

I am also having the slow full defrag problem.

 

But, I've narrowed it a bit further for you...

 

Turn on the option "Move large files to end of drive..."

 

Turn on the option "Move only selected file types:"

 

Change the "Minimum file size" to 1MB and put a bunch of files that will be caught by the filter onto the drive, along with a boot partition (i.e. 16K files about).

 

For me, full defrag with this option turned off defragged my drive in about 1 minute.

 

Turning the option on, and the defrag barely did any activity on the HD, but maxxed out a single core of my system to 100%.

 

It also looks like you're not using parallel processing... That might not be helpful in this type of application though.

 

Please try your tests using this configuration.

 

Thanks!

 

PS: Further updated information:

 

I did a quick defrag which reduced my fragmentation to next to nothing, then did a full defrag with problem options enabled... After an initial delay after analysis, it performed quite quickly.

 

Perhaps the issue will only surface while there's fragmentation present (it didn't have a problem with 2 fragments/16.1KB, but did with 327 fragments/10.7MB).

 

Hope this helps you narrow the focus on the issue.

[Guest MrRon]

Thanks for the extra info, PMs on the way to several members

[Ataraxia]

Can anyone else confirm that disabling sys restore fixes slow defrag?

MrRon

 

Ever since I disabled it, it has run smoother and faster. But mine was never as extreme as 50hrs. I've also noticed that sometimes (with System Restore and Volume Shadow Copy on) after a defragment, I'd end up with 'more' fragmentations than before. Turning Sys. Restore off and running the action: Check Drive for Errors, Cleared it all up.

 

I recommend at least turning it off and restarting before defragmenting, if System Restore is important to you, instead of completely turning it off.

[Guest MrRon]

We are looking at a possible issue with moving lots of very very small files that could cause really slow defrag, but this won't be implemented until 1.17.

In the mean time, I'd be interested in hearing if Quick Defrag (press and hold the Defrag button) clears this issue for some people.

[RichO]

Follow up to Nov 20 posting -

Recently had accumulated several restore points in system. Ran regular Defraggler; it was 49% at 20 minutes; it took another 20 minutes to get to 51%, so I canceled it.

 

Deleted all but most recent restore point, as that solved problem last time - not so this time. Quick Defraggler ran in 15 seconds. Also ran Vista supplied defragger which completed in 30 min.

Ran full Defraggler - it was 50% in 1 minute and 81% in 4 minutes. It stalled at 81%. It shows files being read and written, but no change in percent done. Canceled at 32 minutes. If Defraggler won't complete in less time than the Vista supplied defragger, why run it??

[ack]

We are looking at a possible issue with moving lots of very very small files that could cause really slow defrag, but this won't be implemented until 1.17.

WinXP pro SP3, Defraggler 1.15.163, ext. drive, partition size about 1 TB,

~20.000 files, ~200 GB: 1 file ~150 GB, all other files ~50 GB

 

Defraggler is working on the last five(!) blue squares for about twenty hours.

 

Postponing a solution until v1.17 might (and probably will) seriously damage Defraggler's good reputation.

[Spathi]

Hi, I just tried Defraggler, I was hoping it would just background defrag mildly every few hours on low CPU. So it is not much use to me.

 

A reason some people here are having problems is that it seems to consolidate free space too aggressively. I don't see the point in this.

 

For me, after a few minutes it hit 98% and stayed there for hours. I suspect if I deleted some files off my system it would repeat this process. I had already used Windows Defrag, Ultra Defrag (licensed cos I like it's disk graphic) and Diskeeper, but Defraggler still had to take hours... not good.

 

What any defragger should do is defrag, then consolidate "small spaces" and leave large gaps and defragged areas with many already consolidated small files alone. It appears they all cater to the crowd that say "it did not defrag 100% to the front of my disk/back of my disk/middle of my disk".

 

The obsession with clumping everything 100% perfectly in particular spots on the disk looks quite obtuse to me and results in more disk wear.

[AnnaAnka]

I have the same problem(s). Here is what I have come up with so far.

 

Problem: Extremely slow processing (or possibly no processing at all) when doing a "Defrag Freespace (allow fragmentation)".

 

System:

 

Hewlett-Packard HP Pavilion dv9700 Notebook PC

Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium Build 6002 (SP2)

AMD Turion64 X2 TL-68, 4 GBytes RAM, 2 x 250GB HDs

 

I am quite computer savvy, and have the following Vista features tweaked:

 

"volume shadow copy" permanently turned OFF

"System Restore Point" temporarily turned OFF

 

In addition I have a suspicion towards the following software components:

 

Symantec Norton Internet Security - (hidden and/or protected files on volume?)

Cygwin - (large number of small files)

 

 

Following problems/bugs occur:

 

1.) Defrags free space until it reaches a certain "block" (i.e. light-blue colored square). Here it stalls and continues what seem forever without any success. I have repeated this several times and it seem to be in or around the same block area. This area is where there are a large number of scattered light-blue squares (what do they mean?) in the middle of the disk.

 

2.) There are "white" squares that contains files when you click on them!! (WTF!) [in my case it seem to contain a Symantec file called "NAVENG.EXP"]

 

3.) "Light-blue" squares are NOT defined in your "Drive Map Legend"... (Is that so hard to do?)

 

4.) There is a light-blue square that says it contains a file called "$UsnJrnl:$J" in "C:\$Extend\" that is 19 MB in size. (What does this mean?)

 

Conclusion:

 

This is highly annoying and essentially renders your otherwise excellent software useless... So please fix it ASAP.

 

PS. Everything else seem to work fine. (I.e. Both Quick Defrag and Defrag, although normal Defrag still leaves many scattered fragments around the middle.)

[jamphat]

All right just wanted to throw in some input after digging through this thread. Installed Vista-64 on a brand new WD6401AALS and of course had to install CCleaner and Defraggler immediately after. Few days of use and after installing very large files (Steam applications) I decided to defrag my system. I noticed about half way through Defraggler would hang on a few files between Left 4 Dead 2, Dragon Age: Origins, and some random Windows files. I'd leave it on over night and wake up to absolutely no progress. As someone suggested, I turned off Vista's System Restore and rebooted my computer. Needless to say Defraggler works flawlessly now and I also shed nearly 100 Gigabytes of data in the process. Good luck to the rest of you guys, hope you resolve your issue.

 

Before:

 

After:

[Choka]

Just to show it still becomes slow once after a while...

 

-Defragged a partition so no fragmented files were left

-analysed: 0 fragments

-then made a full defrag so it puts large files at the end of the partition

-after some time it just... stops. It shows defragmenting a file, for like 5 minutes. then i see another file, for another 5 minutes and so on.

-stopped defragmenting

-analysed: 30 fragments with 700mb

 

maybe we should call it fragmentingprogram?

[Niels]

Can anyone else confirm that disabling sys restore fixes slow defrag?

MrRon

 

Yes, it absolutely solved my issues with slow defragmenting.

[Archlinux]

I tried defragging 3 times in a row and every single time Defraggler takes like an hour to complete (I didn't create or delete any files between the defrags - in other words I just had the Defrag on). My C: partition is 241 GB and I have no pagefile.sys, hiberfil.sys or system restore files.

 

Edit: As I checked the defrag process, it does indeed seem that Defraggler spends very much time with the small files that I have on my C:. I dunno if it's somewhat the same time as spent when moving around individual 'medium' sized files but that is indeed the problem.

 

/vote for Reiserism.

[Jelle Fresen]

Summary: the problem of a seemingly halted defragmentation process may be solved by turning off the option 'Move large files to end of drive...', regardless of the System Restore settings.

 

Hello, I too experience a very slow defragmentation process. Fortunately, thanks to the remarks of Danno, I was able to solve my problem by turning off the option to move large files to the end of the drive. I did not have to turn off System Restore to solve my problem.

 

In detail, this is what I experienced: I defragmented a 180 GB sized, 92 GB used, single-partitioned, 57% fragmented NTFS disk. At first, it seemed to be doing nothing, but it turned out to be calculating something. After a minute or so, it rapidly completed the first 2% of the process, after which it almost came to a full halt. It still used 100% of one CPU-core, so it was still busy, and once every so many minutes, the filename from the current status changed. After an hour or two and reading this topic, I lost my confidence in the process; aborted it; unchecked the 'Move large files to end of drive' option; restarted the defragmentation; and voila, now it was actually busy with swapping files instead of computing some seemingly computational hard problem.

 

Having a background in theoretical computer science, I'm quite interested in the calculations involved to move large files to the end of the drive. Which mathematical problems need to be solved during the process, and which algorithms are used? Judging by the time it takes, it seems almost (but I may very well be wrong on this one) that it is trying to solve an NP-hard problem, or otherwise uses a backtracking algorithm to solve some problem --- for each file it needs to process.

 

edit: I also wondered, if the widely known but mostly forgotten fact that System Restore points are compressed by Windows may have anything to do with it. Maybe the strange consequence that the 'Size on disk' may actually be smaller than the 'Size' triggers some kind of bug?

[Archlinux]

I myself never had that option enabled.

 

E: You seem not to know the difference between file allocation and the actual file size:

Maybe the strange consequence that the 'Size on disk' may actually be smaller than the 'Size' triggers some kind of bug?

http://forums.aliensoup.com/showpost.php?p...amp;postcount=2

[DutchKees]

I'm experiencing the same problem. My 1 Tb USB HD had 6% fragmentation and 3 fragmented files. Defraggler is now on for about 20 hours and shows 12% fragmentation and 6 fragmented files at 75%.

 

I am (was?) very fond of Piriform's product (espec. CCleaner, Recuva) so I gave Defraggler a try. Even donated 20 bucks for it (I still think the people of Piriform deserve it...) But now I'm a bit disappointed.

[DutchKees]

Turned of System Restore on my USB drive. Restarded Defraggler. Now I'm at 70% (for hours!) with 3 fragmented files (8% fragmentation).

This is horrible! I'm very, very, very disappointed now. Can I get a refund?

[DennisD]

Sorry to hear of your problems.

 

It would help the developers if you could run Defraggler in "Debug" mode and post the log here.

 

Thanks.

 

http://docs.piriform.com/defraggler/troubl...r-in-debug-mode

[hazelnut]

Can I get a refund?

 

Defraggler, like all Piriform products, is free to all users.

 

People can donate if they wish to, but it is NOT a requirement for using the program

[white knight]

I too have had a horrible first experience. My first analyse showed 97 fragmented files with 1101 total fragments and 41 percent fragmentation. I am running Vista Home premium (and had restore points activated). I run a Vista defragment every week. I ran a degraggler "normal" full defrag. After 12 hours I was 41% done. Then it really started to slow down - taking an hour to do each 1 percent. Then it started taking 4 hours per percent. Finally (at 57 % complete, and 30 hours into my defrag) it was taking nearly 8 hours to do each percent. In the middle of last night Microsoft decided to send me an automatic security upgrade to Vista - which did a computer restart in the middle of my defrag, thus stopping the defrag without me stopping it myself.

 

Question1 : Did I lose the data that was transferring at the moment that Microsoft shut down my computer?

 

Question2: What happens now if I now start a Vista defrag to try to clean up what is now half complete?

[redhawk]

My suggestion would be instead of hitting the "Defrag" button go to the "File List" tab first and have a look at the files that are fragmented to get a better understand of what's involved.

Now click the "Size" column to sort in size order then select all the fragmented files that are 50,000KB or less and defrag these to start with.

 

Still notice a slow defragging problem??

 

Next look at the list of big files and if you have some in the excess of 500,000KB or over then I personally wouldn't touch them unless you need them to be contiguous.

Defragging big files will take time because it's connected to the USB port which is much slower when compared to like a SATA/IDE.

 

To answer the query about interrupted defragging, no you do not lose data because the file system will only commit changes only to files that have been fully moved.

 

Richard S.

[Tuscan Driver]

I started the defrag at 15:00hrs today and its still running, dont think I'll be using Piriforms program again, here's the results so far attached...

[Archlinux]

Ok, so Defraggler is not efficient with small files. I don't think posting a debug output is going to help if this is an implementation feature/problem - not a bug. I can't even post any debug logs as my win 7 died for the 6th time now and I have no intentions of reinstalling the piece of crap (ever) again.

 

But for those complaining about this thing - I suggest you either use quick defrag, 'file-only defrag' or go back to the Windows integrated Defragmenter (which is not a solution in any way).

 

ps. You should know that the threats of not using any Piriform applications anymore is just so glaring that you should think twice before saying that. You honestly think that saying Defraggler is bad and threatening the authors is gonna help one bit of implementing a decent small file handling feature to Defraggler? I'd really like to see any of these moaners to do it themselves - oh right, you need to have some programming skills... well get a refund - oh right, this is FREE software... oh well...

[hottwink]

Hello there,

I'm too facing a similar problem..

I thought of increasing my access speed and so I went for defrag. But I was not able to do it for C:/

Can any 1 help me with this? However, I got to know about my internet speed here http://www.ip-details.com/ . Its as easy as I entered my IP address that I got to know the speed of my connection.

Cheers!

[NailGun]

Hello.

I am doing a sort of research of freeware,trialware and e.t.c

So far i tested defraggler on diffrent situations and diskeeper on my friend's PC.

By this point i'm sticking with Deffraggler because it's simple and a bit faster.

 

BTW Can i download windows's disk defragmenter (because my copy came without it...)

I'm going to test some other programs too and let you know what i think

 

P.S. Some of my friends claim that after defragmenting with diskeeper they freed up some space on C: (about 6 GB) Is that possible?

 

Cheers.

[Uranus One]

I think it would be good, If we carried out an explanation of how and why the files are fragmented. And the factors which depends.

The number of fragments depends of the number of files, the size of files, if whether or not contiguous free space, the frequency with which they move, copy or delete files to disk, the cluster size of the partition.

 

If you have never defragmented the drive, can not presume to Defraggler or another, be able to fix everything in one hour.

If you would like to apply a perfectly defragment, for each new file, copied, moved or deleted from disk, you should defragment.

 

But people do not realize something, if for example defragment drive "C:\", and while we are surfing the net, downloading files, watching youtube videos, chatting, all that occur in these programs, as a temporary file is downloaded to disk " C:\ ", so while defragment, we are creating more fragments.

If you are defragmenting a disk, does not use that until you finalize the disk defragmentation.

 

The first defrag take some time, and if you defragment once a year, always take a long time.

 

If in that unit, you copy and delete many files all the time, always have a lot of fragments, which is then translated in time when defragment.

 

It is a process that must be maintained and learn.

 

----

If we talk about hardware, Other issues to consider, which makes the difference is, the size of the disk buffer memory (2Mb/8Mb/16Mb/32Mb) and size of physical ram. Obviously transfer speed of the chipset is included.

If you have 256MB of RAM, I wish you patience, also with a disk of 60GB. For instance, today I did a full defragmentation on a machine with AMD 2400, 512MB ram and 80GB drive (40% free) took 5 hours. It seems that the unit was never defragmented. Before I defragment the free space, allowing fragmentation, but I do not remember the time.

 

 

Greetings!