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

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

 

  1. Get report of fragmentation:
$ sudo e4defrag -c /location
  1. After checking the results you can run the defragmentation:
$ sudo e4defrag /location
  1. If you want extra info:
$ man e4defrag

This is result on out test env:

image.png

Reference:

 

Hope it helps for your DC installations on ext4.

Cheers,

Gonchik Tsymzhitov

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DPKJ
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January 5, 2021

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

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Gonchik Tsymzhitov
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January 6, 2021

Good question, let me investigate that possibility. 

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

DPKJ
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January 7, 2021
Sergey Papurin
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January 18, 2022

@DPKJ 

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

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