Self fragmentation? (Was: Re: Parallel Startup for KDE.)

[Stefan Heimers]

Am Freitag, 3. Oktober 2003 01.08 schrieb Andrew Morton:

> > What will happen over time with lots of small files, few big, files
> > are rewritten (growing) by writing completely new file, rename...
>
> It turns to crap...

I always was told that ext2 would defragment itself during use, unless 
the partition is almost full. Is this wrong?

Is the problem ext2 itself, or just poor implementation? Does journaling 
(ext3) make it better, or worse?

What about other filesystems, like reiserfs or xfs, are they any better?


Stefan