Defraggler Performance?

[Kramy]

Hello there.

 

I have a few games which stupidly don't have their gamedata zipped. Because of this, my game partition has about 400k files in it. Defraggler takes close to 20 hours to defragment this.

 

Is there some way to make this go faster? Or some change that could be made in Defraggler to speed this up?

 

 

I'm on XP Pro SP3. I have 3GB+ of RAM free, and 4 cores, but Defraggler only uses a little bit of memory and 30% CPU. (Two threads? Logic in one, I/O in another?)

 

Also, it seems to leave small holes everywhere. If I were to download something to my game partition after defragmenting, such as a 700MB Ubuntu ISO over HTTP, then afterwards it's split into several thousand fragments. Is this normal? Shouldn't it be split into only a couple fragments?

 

If I download to C:\ instead, which only has 10k files, then the same file is only in a few dozen fragments.

 

-Kramy

[Aethec]

Try right-clicking on your drives in Defraggler, then Advanced >> Defrag Freespacce (Allow Fragmentation). This should not leave holes.

 

PS : XP on a quad-core system ? Seriously ?

[Kramy]

Try right-clicking on your drives in Defraggler, then Advanced >> Defrag Freespacce (Allow Fragmentation). This should not leave holes.

 

PS : XP on a quad-core system ? Seriously ?

It used to be an Athlon X2 from ~2007, but thanks to Asus and their good BIOS support, it supports Phenom II X4's. I had to do some video encoding, so I upgraded.

 

In 2007 the only option was XP or Vista, so the choice is entirely obvious.

[Aethec]

What about the freespace defrag ?

 

(a little offtopic, but...you will see a big difference in performance if you upgrade to Win7. XP just can't handle multi-core processors, gigabytes of RAM, or any modern hardware, correctly ; Vista and 7 can.)

[Kramy]

What about the freespace defrag ?

It doesn't seem to be leaving holes, but it's still taking 20+ hours.

 

As the number of files on the drive increases, the amount of time per file goes up. It's now at ~4 seconds.

 

(a little offtopic, but...you will see a big difference in performance if you upgrade to Win7. XP just can't handle multi-core processors, gigabytes of RAM, or any modern hardware, correctly ; Vista and 7 can.)

Possible, but unlikely. I looked into it for Vista. While Vista did succeed in having higher CPU usage for every core, this was mainly due to increased overhead. In a few benchmarks it scored 5-10% better, but this was actually due to kernel optimizations, rather than better multi-core support. It shows if you restrict them to just a single core, and everything else to other cores. Also, Linux would run those benchmarks with scores 40+% higher, proving there's a long way to go yet.

 

Win7 may have changed that. It seems like they're finally threading stuff properly, so I/O doesn't completely block the UI for stupid reasons. More threads will naturally run better on more cores, assuming there's no shared resources and locking to completely tank performance.

 

But in my case I went the other direction. I used nLite to strip back XP to ~10 processes, and ~100 threads, which makes it quite speedy for games. But don't worry - I wouldn't post here without verifying the exact same behaviour on a regular XP install. When I had my Athlon X2, the framerates for CPU-bound games (in particular, Source games) went up 20-25% by stripping the OS down. (80fps -> ~95-100fps)

[Aethec]

What about the Windows built-in defragmenter ? Is it faster ? (if it is, then there's a bug in Defraggler...the XP defrag is not really a good one)

 

(contrarily to popular myths, Vista is not worse than XP if you have normal drivers, and Linux is not better than any of those - but that's totally offtopic.)

[eL_PuSHeR]

I have said several times that for me Windows built-in defragmenter takes a lot fewer time defragging huge partitions. But it isn't fair comparing Defraggler "slow" method to Windows built-in defragmenter one. When using QuickDefrag, Defraggler is faster and it allows for defragmenting single files.

[Kramy]

What about the Windows built-in defragmenter ? Is it faster ? (if it is, then there's a bug in Defraggler...the XP defrag is not really a good one)

 

(contrarily to popular myths, Vista is not worse than XP if you have normal drivers, and Linux is not better than any of those - but that's totally offtopic.)

Yes, the built-in defrag is faster. Even at its slowest moments, it's faster than one 4KiB file per couple seconds.

 

I just tried MyDefrag. It took about 1 hour and 50 minutes to do the volume, using the Monthly Data Disk preset. It moved almost every file into one huge multi-hundred-GB chunk at the end of the partition.