People who use Linux often think that it doesn’t require defragmentation. This is a common misunderstanding across Linux users. Actually, the Linux operating system does support defragmentation.
This of course begs the question “Do I need to defragment my Linux file systems?”
If you’re a Linux user, you’ve probably heard that you don’t need to defragment your Linux file systems. You’ll also notice that Linux distributions don’t come with disk-defragmenting utilities. But why is that?
Let us see if we can figure it out. it allocates more “buffer” free space around files on the drive, although, as any Windows user can tell you, NTFS file systems still become fragmented over time. Because of the way these file systems work, they need to be defragmented to stay at peak performance.
Is it possible to avoid fragmentation in Linux?
However, the file system is designed to avoid fragmentation in normal use. If you do have problems with fragmentation on Linux, you probably need a larger hard disk.
You can measure the fragmentation of a Linux file system with the fsck command — look for “non-contiguous inodes” in the output.
Does linux improve performance?
Performance: Linux provides persistent high performance on servers and on networks. It can handle large numbers of users and simultaneous connections. Over time, Linux consistently outperforms other high-end server operating systems.
When we were researching we ran into the inquiry “Does Linux have better performance than Windows?”.
In some cases where the tools are equal on both Linux and Windows, a Linux computer can definitely have better performance. /u/uoou sums things up petty good but here’s a good example. When valve was first prepping doing steam for Linux they ported l4d2 to Linux.
If you know you don’t use software that requires atime, then you can get a slight performance boost by setting noatime in your /etc/fstab file. This tells the kernel not to track the Last Accessed time, avoiding that tiny performance hit to continually update atime in the filesystem.
Then, is Linux a good OS for gaming?
As Linux establishes itself as a gaming platform it will be taken into account earlier in the development process and performance will improve, as will the underlying components of the OS which are getting more attention than ever now that Linux is emerging as a gaming platform. Besides the experience it takes to successfuly install a game.
What is Linux relatime and why should I Care?
In short: modern Linux systems (since Linux 2.6.30, released in 2009) already use relatime, which should give you a really fast performance boost. That means you don’t need to tweak your /etc/fstab file and can rely on the relatime kernel default.