Originally posted by jtshaw:
Heh, ok Pat, I will try to explain:

The nature of an ext2 partition means it doesn't need to be defragged... ext2 isn't a "table" like partition type like FAT is. The way ext2 works is it has a certain number of nodes, called INODES. Everytime a piece of data is put on the harddrive it gets an INODE and is placed on the drive. The data never has to be split up in blocks like in the FAT table (ie when you save a file to disk on ext2 it stays in original form). The reason why FAT needs defragging is sometimes when a file is put into multiple blocks they are not placed adjacent on the disk or they are put in the wrong order. Defragging puts them back in the correct order and as adjacent as possible.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both methods. When you defrag FAT partitions you can also put things on disk such that it will be found and read faster. However, FAT requires a finite blocksize and will only allow one file (or one part of a file) per block. This means if you put 10 2k files on a FAT disk that has 4k blocks the files will take up 40k worth of space instead of 20k like they would on an ext2 partition. I think in benchmarking a completely optimized FAT partition might be slightly faster reading then an ext2 partition but it is not something the end user will be able to readily tell.

Back to your original problem with slowdown in Xwindows. It is very possible that Pat is correct and you are getting no 2D acceleration from your video card, thus the processor is working hard on all the applications open as well as rendering the graphics. To test a theory like that you could scale down the color depth and/or resolution and see if that helps. If it doesn't then it could be one of your programs you have running has a memory leak or is just plain poorly written. Linux programs are certainly not perfect, many of them are in various forms of beta release and the developers for most of them are doing it as a side project. That is why it is fairly important to keep up with new releases on programs for Linux. Maybe some of the money that big companies like Intel, IBM, HP, ect. are pumping into linux development will go to some of the smaller developers so they can sit down and really work hard on there programs to get them optimized and bug-free.

Thanks for the explanation! That was quite informative. If only winamp would start releasing betas for linux, i'd be very happy. Thats the only problems i really have right now is XMMS stuttering when i minimize it, and a rather crappy equalizer (nothing over 6k does much at all).


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Pat D.

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