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How do I keep a single directory as unfragmented as possible?

yotesyotes Registered User regular
in Moe's Stupid Technology Tavern
Specifically, my Opera disk cache directory.

Windows 2000 SP4
One HDD, split into C: (Windows install, swap, hibernation file, ~500MB free of 4GB) and D: (Programs, data, 8/70GB free) partitions
Using JKDefragGUI for defrag

As much as I love Opera, there's one issue that is really annoying: after even a day or two after defragmenting the drive it's on, the cache blows up to thousands of files, most of which have hundreds of fragments strewn all across the D: partition. This leads to occasional serious thrashing. I have just now moved the cache directory to the C: partition and reduced its size from 200 to 50MB, but I'm not very confident that it will all be kept in a coherent chunk.

Is there any way to ensure that the cache directory stays unfragmented that doesn't involve regular defragmentation or re-partitioning of the drive to set aside a special cache partition? I know Truecrypt uses container files to emulate drives, is there any other tool that would provide the same functionality, just without encryption and as resource-friendly as possible?

yotes on
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
• Agree Awesome

Posts

  • FyreWulffFyreWulff Registered User, ClubPA regular
    It's fragmenting because the drive is already fragmented. There's nothing Opera can do about it because all it does is ask to write data to the drive, the OS finds a big-enough space on the drive to write the file to, and if it can't it'll write it to two fragments.

    Does your HDD have a lot of bad sectors? You do watch a lot of Youtube? (10-20MB+ files being written to your HDD there)

    • Agree Awesome
  • FyreWulffFyreWulff Registered User, ClubPA regular
    After reading your OP more carefully, you also only have about 10% free space on either drive. Low disk space will absolutely make XP/2000 thrash. You need bigger drives or a lot of deletion to do.

    • Agree Awesome
  • yotesyotes Registered User regular
    No bad sectors, no Youtube.

    I know I don't have a lot of free space left, but on C: there is a very large chunk of contiguous unfragmented free space, yet all the small files are scattered all over and every new file is written in 20+ fragments.

    Maybe I should go whine at the Opera devs.

    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
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  • TrentusTrentus Registered User regular
    yotes wrote: »
    Maybe I should go whine at the Opera devs.

    I don't think that would be a good idea. It isn't Opera's fault. As FyreWulff says, Opera just tells the OS "write this to the disk please" and the OS does the rest.

    • Agree Awesome
  • bashbash Registered User regular
    The disk thrashing is more likely due to a serious lack of physical memory than it is with file fragmentation. Opera can't really do much about cache files fragmenting because the whole behavior of caching is tied to browsing. Unless your browsing habits are entirely deterministic there's no real way for Opera to coalesce file writes in an attempt to keep cache files contiguous on the disk. Cache files tend to be relatively small (taking up only a few blocks on disk) and are deleted regularly as they expire. This behavior is going to cause fragmentation on a disk without a lot of free space.

    comi-sig1.jpg
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  • yotesyotes Registered User regular
    Lack of physical RAM is an issue that can't be corrected at the moment.

    So the problem is a combination of Opera's cache system (lots of tiny files instead of a few big ones like Firefox, or the huge monolithic behemoth that is the Windows pagefile) and NTFS being unable to deal with all the small files in a sane fashion, it seems.

    Meh.

    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
    • Agree Awesome
  • FyreWulffFyreWulff Registered User, ClubPA regular
    Firefox, IE, and Opera all cache in the same way.

    Less physical RAM = more hitting the HDD instead of RAMdisk.

    So either you add RAM, or you free up about 10GB on both those partitions.

    • Agree Awesome
  • sinnsinn Registered User
    Not really sure why you're so intent on blaming Opera for your disk performance issues. As previous posters have said, it is your lack of disk space and physical RAM which is truly to blame. If added RAM and disk space aren't an option then I'm afraid you're pretty much out of luck.

    And no amount of whining to the Opera devs is going to fix a problem that stems from your seemingly out-of-date PC not being up to the task at hand.

    He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.
    • Agree Awesome
  • .kbf?.kbf? Registered User
    yotes wrote: »
    Lack of physical RAM is an issue that can't be corrected at the moment.

    So the problem is a combination of Opera's cache system (lots of tiny files instead of a few big ones like Firefox, or the huge monolithic behemoth that is the Windows pagefile) and NTFS being unable to deal with all the small files in a sane fashion, it seems.

    Meh.

    Just because the HDD has a good amount of space left doesn't mean the OS can use it to write files to. It could be used by the page file for instance and thus, not available.

    Delete a couple Gb of data and do a defragment and you'll see an improvement.

    • Agree Awesome
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