setup.exe and disk fragmentation

["Cliff Hones" <cliff at aonix dot co dot uk>]

Having discovered the disk containing my Cygwin installation
was heavily fragmented, I tried the following experiment:

. Create a new NTFS using format - size 2.7Gb
. Run setup to install almost everything, using snapshot
  version 2.249.2.1, from a local dir on another partition.
. Examine the resulting disk layout (I used Diskeeper and O&O
  Defrag).

I was surprised to find that although the final installation
used only 334Mb, the files were scattered over the whole
partition, and so were the directories - it seems setup makes
heavy use of temporary files.  There were even a few files
which had already been fragmented.  Having the directories
scattered so much over the partition makes the job of a defragmenter
extremely difficult, and makes future bad fragmentation of the disk
highly likely.  On NT systems directories can only be consolidated
by 3rd party tools such as ExecSoft's Diskeeper, running at boot time.

It is unfortunate that NTFS behaves in this way, and not, of course,
a bug in setup, but it may be worth bearing in mind when further
developing the utility.  Minimising file copying, and deleting
temporary files as soon as possible would help.

BTW - this version of setup ran (on NT4SP6a) with no problems.  The
only oddity was the corrupted text on the "View" button.

-- Cliff





--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Bug reporting:         http://cygwin.com/bugs.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/