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How to check the fragmentation and do defragmentation on ext4? Helpful check for home directory

Gonchik Tsymzhitov

Today, I got a question about how to check the fragmentation of ext4 filesystems, as most common for the Data Center edition or Server edition setups.

That article is the next step of a previous story about the improvement of latency for volumes.

Of course, some users can ask why we need to do defragmentation on ext4 as it’s not fragmented. As an answer, I would recommend checking out the presentation from LinuxCon 2010 with the name Outline of Ext4 File System & Ext4 Online Defragmentation Foresight and watch the small video with fragmentation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0TzYtuh8D0)

So let’s start to use one small command line utility e4defrag.

Online man page you can find here: http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/focal/man8/e4defrag.8.html

Get report of fragmentation:

$ sudo e4defrag -c /location

After checking the results you can run the defragmentation:

$ sudo e4defrag /location

If you want extra info:

$ man e4defrag

This is result on out test env:

Reference:

Akira Fujita - Outline of Ext4 File System & Ext4 Online Defragmentation Foresight - https://events.static.linuxfound.org/slides/2010/linuxcon_japan/linuxcon_jp2010_fujita.pdf
Takashi Sato - ext4 online defragmentation - https://www.kernel.org/doc/ols/2007/ols2007v2-pages-179-186.pdf
Source code of utility - https://github.com/tytso/e2fsprogs/blob/master/misc/e4defrag.c
Previous article: The story about how to improve the background indexing Lucene job for Jira in one shot (just non-standard way)?

Hope it helps for your DC installations on ext4.

Cheers,

Gonchik Tsymzhitov

Comments

Will this help if instances are hosted on AWS, using Atlassian provided templates?

Gonchik Tsymzhitov

Good question, let me investigate that possibility.

@DPKJ Could you share some information about your AWS installation, please?

Here it is - https://aws.amazon.com/quickstart/architecture/jira/

On AWS default is XFS not EXT4
It can be checked and defragged with xfs_db and xfs_fsr

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