Panther Automatically Defrags

[Marble]

This is an interesting thread at Ars Technica that I saw someone post elsewhere. Pretty interesting, and some seriously funny code .

Panther Automatically Defrags

 

[edesignuk]

Wow, cool, they really have thought of everything!

 

[rainman::|:|]

i love how everyone in that forum complains about how it'll slow down panther, create massive paging, and should be able to be turned off, yet people have been using panther for weeks or months and have only great things to say about speed. sounds like computer hypochondria to me, they're noticing some nonexistant problem after they find a possible cause for it.



i think it's cool obviously it's not meant to keep your system totally optimized but it should help a lot with commonly used (smaller) files.

pnw

 

[Vector]

Can anyone tell by the code cited in the linked thread how often panther runs this opertation?

 

[Marble]

While the Panther UI and generally snappiness is much faster, I've found that using the journaled filesystem on my 4200rpm notebook hard drive causes noticeable lag when I'm moving files from directory to directory, to the trash, etc. It actually takes about one second between hitting command-delete and actually seeing the icon disappear from my finder window with the little "clink" sound. With journaling disabled, the process is instantaneous. I wonder if this has something to do with it?

 

[iEric]

I think thats pretty cool.
Not like Windows..Where the defrag doesn't even work!!!

 

[j33pd0g]

Originally posted by Marble
While the Panther UI and generally snappiness is much faster, I've found that using the journaled filesystem on my 4200rpm notebook hard drive causes noticeable lag when I'm moving files from directory to directory, to the trash, etc. It actually takes about one second between hitting command-delete and actually seeing the icon disappear from my finder window with the little "clink" sound. With journaling disabled, the process is instantaneous. I wonder if this has something to do with it?

I have a 1.25 DP G4, with 768 MB o' ram. I have done a clean install... moving items to the trash takes 2 Mississippi's. I am not thrilled by this at all. Some people say it's instant. I don't get it. I want instant. However, a finder undo puts the item back instantaneously, so I suppose there are worse things I could be crying about.

 

[Marble]

The most obvious solution to this problem would be to make sure your hard drive isn't set to spin down when idle (in Energy Saver).
Your drive should be fast enough to accomodate the journaling features in Panther (I assume 7200rpm?), but there may be utilities out there to disable it after install. I notice no slowdown using the regular HFS+ file system.