on a nearly full (~2-3GB free) 330GB ext3 volume. I've gotten nearly 30mb/s over the network in the past, now I'm lucky to get 5-10mb/s and Samba often stalls/disconnects before transfers finish. Suspect is has something to do with excessive fragmentation due to the severe lack of free space. That 330GB figure is after I removed the ~5% block reservation for root. If I re-reserve those blocks for root, will ext3 do the smart thing and use that 16GB of free space to do its background defragmentation thing?

5% for root? what kind of partitioning tool are you using?

I believe it was the Slackware 9.1 ext3 formatter that set that originally. It's easy to change after the fact with tune2fs though.

nah, the root reservation is only used for emergency recovery and the like. You're getting poor writing performance because your filesystem "pads" each file so it can be changed without moving it. Because you have so little space left it's having to optimizie for file space instead, copying each file and moving it together. This causes write performance to suffer around 90% utilization.

So, the only option I have is to free up some space and hope for the best?

if the partition wasnt so damn huge id suggest backing things up and switching to a newer FS

Performace wise, about 10-15% free space is sufficent for hard drive performance. As soon as you free up some space, defrag.

Huh. I didn't know ext3 got that bad. I had read that Reiser3 gets pretty slow up near 85% usage, but I've got a pegged ReiserFS which never has given me any large performance hit. I really only use ext3 on areas where I might need a different or older Linux distribution to do repair work with. At the moment, only my /boot is ext3 but I'll probably re-arrange stuff so more essentials like /sbin and /lib are covered as well.

At the moment, I use Reiser3 on anything larger than a gig. There's a twofold reason behind that: One- I hate dealing with inodes, and two- it's one of the three choices on the Slackware installer (in other words, I'm lazy). I'd have switched to XFS a while back for my media drives since I had heard XFS has fun ACL integration options in Samba. The only thing holding me back is my former roomie, Ern, was having troubles with it self-destructing. That was 2-1/2 years ago. I haven't looked into it since, but it's probably been fixed. Ern, if you're reading this, care to comment?

What really suprises me is that you have a few *gigs* left over and ext3 is acting up. Unless ext3 is based off of pure percentage, I wouldn't think it would start thrashing until it was down near it's last fifty megs or so.



You've never used ext3 before, right?

No, I havn't and I wasn't really paying attention when I posted. So ignore my post.

Tried the defragging option with the O&O defragging tool for linux. Fortunately it only ate one file. The last fsck I remember doing (about two days ago, after the defrag debacle), said I was running 15%+ fragmentation.

Are there any in-place converters for reiser3/4? Or is the only option to back everything up, reformat, and restore?

no you cant convert to reiser. and keep in mind that you'll need a relatively new (& patched) kernel to use reiser4. ck-sources or mm-sources will do, not sure what others support it.