Defragmentation
What is Defragmentation and why do I need it?
Defragmentation, often referred to as “defrag,” is the process of reorganizing data on your hard drive. It brings together scattered pieces of data, aligning them in a continuous and efficient manner.
You could say that defragmentation is like cleaning house for your Servers or PCs, it picks up all of the pieces of data that are spread across your hard drive and puts them back together again, nice and neat and clean.
Defragmentation increases computer performance.
Revolutionizing “Defragmentation” for Modern Systems
Defragmentation has undergone a transformative evolution to address the challenges posed by today’s advanced computing environments. While file and free space fragmentation persist in Windows environments, the strategies to combat these issues and enhance system performance demand a specialized and contemporary approach.
As the creators of Diskeeper, hailed as the most renowned “disk defragmenter” in history, we’ve achieved this evolution! Modern technologies, such as SSDs, virtualized systems, and cloud integration, introduce multiple layers of I/O inefficiencies and bottlenecks. To tackle these challenges head-on, we proudly present DymaxIO® fast data performance software.
DymaxIO stands at the forefront of innovation, eliminating I/O bottlenecks and delivering a substantial boost to overall Windows performance. Our software is meticulously crafted to unleash the full potential of your Windows systems, promising accelerated application response times, seamless operations, and heightened productivity for individuals or entire organizations.
Embark on a transformative journey by downloading a free 30-day trial of DymaxIO. Supercharge your PC’s performance now »
The Anatomy of Fragmentation
A natural byproduct of continuous file operations, fragmentation is an inherent facet of computing. To accommodate the creation, editing, and saving of files, they are broken into pieces to fit within the available spaces on the disk. As files and free space become fragmented, the efficiency of computer performance diminishes. However, within DymaxIO’s arsenal of optimization features lies a pivotal solution – the prevention of performance-degrading fragmentation before it takes root! Augmented by DymaxIO’s array of patented technologies, the result is a swift enhancement of Windows performance, surpassing even its pristine state, and a prolonged lifespan for your system!
Defragmentation and SSDs?
Traditional old-school defrag is a no-no for SSDs. However, it’s crucial to recognize SSD performance does degrade over time and requires specialized treatment. Learn the details about SSD performance degradation and shortened lifespan resulting from the way data is written into the small free spaces, causing write performance degradation of up to 80% to the solid-state storage device. Read here.
Assessing Fragmentation Problems
It’s a common misconception for users to blame computer performance problems on the operating system or simply think their computer is “old”, whereas the true culprit is often disk fragmentation or I/O inefficiencies.
Recognize the signs of fragmentation-related issues:
- Slow applications
- System crashes and freezes
- Slow backup times
- Reduced data transfer speeds
- Slow boot-up times
- and more…
If your Windows systems are just giving you trouble, run a free 30-day trial of DymaxIO and see if it solves it. You might be pleasantly surprised, saving both the cost and effort typically associated with troubleshooting!
Defragmentation Performance Gains
Say goodbye to old-school defrag and embrace the power of optimization technologies that proactively prevent fragmentation, inefficient I/O operations, and intelligently cache hot reads. Experience a multitude of benefits, including:
- Blazing fast application performance
- Reduced timeouts and crashes
- Improved throughput and efficiency
- Extended hardware lifecycle
- Get more work done in less time
- Plus much more!
Get these benefits and more! See for yourself with a free 30-day trial of DymaxIO here.
SQL Server Performance and Fragmentation
Among enterprise applications, SQL Server applications stand out as the most I/O intensive, making them susceptible to performance degradation. Implementing strategies to minimize the required I/O for SQL tasks can significantly enhance the server’s overall performance for the application, offering a key advantage for database administrators.
Get the details here Get the Most Performance From Your SQL Server
SAN, NAS, RAID and Fragmentation
Fragmentation prevention offers significant benefits when implemented on intricate modern hardware technologies such as RAID, NAS and SANs, and all-flash. SANs, NAS devices, corporate servers, and even high-end workstations and multimedia-centric desktops characteristically implement multiple physical disk drives in some form of fault-tolerant disk striping (RAID). Because the purpose of fault-tolerant disk striping is to offer redundancy, as well as improved disk performance by splitting the I/O load, it is a common misconception that fragmentation does not have a negative impact. It’s also important to note that the interface; EIDE, SCSI, SATA, i-SCSI, Fibre Channel, etc… does not alter the relevance of defragmentation.
Regardless of the sophistication of the hardware installed, the SAN appears to Windows as one logical drive. So when Windows reads a fragmented file, it has to logically find all those thousands of pieces, and that takes thousands of separate I/O operations to piece it all together before it is fed to the user. That exerts a heavy toll on performance.
Regardless of the sophistication of the hardware installed, the SAN appears to Windows as one logical drive. The data may look pretty on the arrays, but to the OS, it is still fragmented. Windows has fragmentation built into the very fabric. Open up the defrag utility on any server or PC running and see how many fragments currently exist and the file with the most fragments. If you haven’t been running defrag, you will find files in thousands of pieces. So when Windows does a read, it has to logically find all those thousands of pieces, and that takes thousands of separate I/O operations to piece it all together before it is fed to the user. That exerts a heavy toll on performance — admittedly, which could be masked to some degree by the capability of the SAN hardware.
Because the purpose of fault-tolerant disk striping is to offer redundancy, as well as improved disk performance by distributing the I/O load, it is a common misconception that fragmentation does not have a negative impact. It’s also important to note that the interface; EIDE, SCSI, SATA, i-SCSI, Fibre Channel, etc… does not alter the relevance of defragmentation.
As this data will show, these devices do suffer from fragmentation. This is attributed to the impact of fragmentation on “logical” allocation of files and to a varying degree, their “physical” distribution.
The file system driver, NTFS.sys, handles the logical location (what the operating system and a defragmenter affect). The actual ‘writing’ is then passed to the fault-tolerant device driver (hardware or software RAID), which then, according to its procedures, handles the placement of files, and generating parity information, finally passing the data to the disk device driver (provided by drive manufacturer).
As noted, stripe sets are created, in part, for performance reasons. Access to the data on a stripe set is usually faster than access to the same data would be on a single disk, because the I/O load is spread across more than one disk. Therefore, an operating system can perform simultaneous seeks on more than one disk and can even have simultaneous reads or writes occurring.
Stripe sets work well in the following environments:
- When users need rapid access to large databases or other data structures.
- Storing program images, DLLs, or run-time libraries for rapid loading.
- Applications using asynchronous multi-threaded I/O’s.
Stripe sets are not well suited in the following situations:
- When programs make requests for small amounts of sequentially located data. For example, if a program requests 8K at a time, it might take eight separate I/O requests to read or write all the data in a 64K stripe, which is not a very good use of this storage mechanism.
- When programs make synchronous random requests for small amounts of data. This causes I/O bottlenecks because each request requires a separate seek operation. 16-bit single-threaded programs are very prone to this problem.
It is quite obvious that RAID can exploit a well written application that can take advantage of asynchronous multi-threaded I/O techniques. Physical members in the RAID environment are not read or written to directly by an application. Even the Windows file system sees it as one single “logical” drive. This logical drive has (LCN) logical cluster numbering just like any other volume supported under Windows. As an application reads and writes to this logical environment (creating new files, extending existing ones, as well as deleting others) the files become fragmented. Because of this fact, fragmentation on this logical drive will have a substantial negative performance effect. When an I/O request is processed by the file system, there are a number of attributes that must be checked which cost valuable system time. If an application has to issue multiple “unnecessary” I/O requests, as in the case of fragmentation, not only is the processor kept busier than needed, but once the I/O request has been issued, the RAID hardware/software must process it and determine which physical member to direct the I/O request. Intelligent RAID caching at this layer can mitigate the negative impact of physical fragmentation to varying degrees but will not solve the overhead caused to the operating system with the logical fragmentation.
To gauge the impact of fragmentation on a RAID system employ performance monitoring technologies such as PerfMon and examine Average Disk Queue Length, Split IO/Sec, and % Disk Time. Additional disk performance tuning information can be found in Microsoft’s online resources.
Fig 1.0: Diagram of Disk I/O as it travels from Operating System to SAN LUN.
More about SAN Performance.
As high performing storage solutions based on block protocols (e.g. iSCSI, FC), SANs excel at optimizing block access. SANs work at a storage layer underneath the operating systems file system; usually NTFS when discussing Microsoft Windows®. That dictates that a SAN is unaware of “file” fragmentation and unable to solve this issue.
With file fragmentation causing the host operating system to generate additional unnecessary disk I/Os (more overhead on CPU and RAM) performance suffers. In most cases the randomness of I/O requests, due to fragmentation and concurrent data requests, the blocks that make up the file will be physically scattered in uneven stripes across a SAN LUN/aggregate. This causes even greater degradation in performance.
Fortunately, there are simple solutions to NTFS file system fragmentation; fragmentation prevention and defragmentation. Both approaches solve file fragmentation at the source, the local disk file system.
Learn more, read: How to get the most performance from your SAN »
Email Servers and Fragmentation
The benefit of preventing fragmentation in an email server environment is no different than prevent
ing fragmentation or defragmenting any other system. It simply takes less time and system resources to access a contiguous file than one broken into many individual pieces. This improves not only response time but also the reliability of the system. Thorough database maintenance requires a combination of disk defrag and the email server utilities (internal record/index defragmentation), to achieve optimum performance and response time.
The tools for Microsoft Exchange (ESE and EDB Utilities) deal with internal record fragmentation by rearranging the internal records/indexes on the fly when possible, and at times requiring a whole new copy of the database to be created and each record copied to the new file. Even if this copy is done to a freshly formatted volume or a defragmented volume with a free space chunk large enough to contain the entire database, it’s quite likely that this new copy will become fragmented.
Email servers are prone to fragmentation, whether they are Microsoft® Exchange or others.
There are two types of volume-centric fragmentation to be concerned about: file fragmentation and free space fragmentation. File fragmentation concerns computer files that are not contiguous, but rather are broken into scattered parts. Free space fragmentation describes a condition in which unused space on a disk is scattered into many small parts rather than a small number of larger spaces. File fragmentation causes problems with accessing data stored in computer files, while free space fragmentation causes problems creating new data files or extending (adding to) old ones.
Taken together, the two types of fragmentation are commonly referred to as “disk” or “volume” fragmentation. It is important to note that, when talking about fragmentation, we are talking about the file as a container for data and not about the contents (data) of the file itself.
Typically email application databases such as Microsoft Exchange are made up of a large container file that is pre-allocated in size at the point of creation. As the database increases beyond the initial assessment the file becomes fragmented.
People sometimes describe fragmentation as a condition in which a file has its records (internal contents) scattered about within the file, separated by numerous small gaps. This type of fragmentation may be a problem with the application which maintains the file; it is not inherent in the operating system or file structure.
Over a period of time, any popular email application server will experience this “internal” fragmentation of its database. This is where records are removed, but the space it occupied within the database is still there and is either reused for a new record or must be skipped over.
Let’s say you have 250,000 records represented in an email server database. If an individual record (e.g. a deleted email) is removed, the location is simply marked as deleted. In the course of doing business hundreds, perhaps thousands of records are added and deleted. It doesn’t take long for the internal organization of a database file, its indexes, and other related files to quickly become quite disorganized. The speed of locating a particular record or segment of information is directly related to the amount of time spent skipping over these holes or internal fragments.
It is important to state that Condusiv software does not, under any circumstances, restructure or alter the internal contents of any file. Altering or restructuring a file is a very dangerous thing to do as one would have to have a very intimate knowledge of a given file structure and be able to detect changes as the various databases evolved with new releases. Therefore, any holes or ‘records marked as deleted’ within the database, prior to defragmentation are still present.
The tools for Microsoft Exchange (ESE and EDB Utilities) deal with this internal record fragmentation by rearranging the internal records/indexes on the fly when possible, and at times requiring a whole new copy of the database to be created and each record copied to the new file. Even if this copy is done to a freshly formatted volume or a defragmented volume with a free space chunk large enough to contain the entire database, it’s quite likely that this new copy will become fragmented. It is strongly recommended to run Diskeeper® on a daily basis to ensure peak performance from your database and email servers.
Learn more, read: How you can improve your Email Server performance »
The tools for Microsoft Exchange (ESE and EDB Utilities) deal with internal record fragmentation by rearranging the internal records/indexes on the fly when possible, and at times requiring a whole new copy of the database to be created and each record copied to the new file. Even if this copy is done to a freshly formatted volume or a defragmented volume with a free space chunk large enough to contain the entire database, it’s quite likely that this new copy will become fragmented.
Email servers are prone to fragmentation, whether they are Microsoft® Exchange or others.
There are two types of volume-centric fragmentation to be concerned about: file fragmentation and free space fragmentation. File fragmentation concerns computer files that are not contiguous, but rather are broken into scattered parts. Free space fragmentation describes a condition in which unused space on a disk is scattered into many small parts rather than a small number of larger spaces. File fragmentation causes problems with accessing data stored in computer files, while free space fragmentation causes problems creating new data files or extending (adding to) old ones.
Taken together, the two types of fragmentation are commonly referred to as “disk” or “volume” fragmentation. It is important to note that, when talking about fragmentation, we are talking about the file as a container for data and not about the contents (data) of the file itself.
Typically email application databases such as Microsoft Exchange are made up of a large container file that is pre-allocated in size at the point of creation. As the database increases beyond the initial assessment the file becomes fragmented.
People sometimes describe fragmentation as a condition in which a file has its records (internal contents) scattered about within the file, separated by numerous small gaps. This type of fragmentation may be a problem with the application which maintains the file; it is not inherent in the operating system or file structure.
Over a period of time, any popular email application server will experience this “internal” fragmentation of its database. This is where records are removed, but the space it occupied within the database is still there and is either reused for a new record or must be skipped over.
Let’s say you have 250,000 records represented in an email server database. If an individual record (e.g. a deleted email) is removed, the location is simply marked as deleted. In the course of doing business hundreds, perhaps thousands of records are added and deleted. It doesn’t take long for the internal organization of a database file, its indexes, and other related files to quickly become quite disorganized. The speed of locating a particular record or segment of information is directly related to the amount of time spent skipping over these holes or internal fragments.
It is important to state that Condusiv software does not, under any circumstances, restructure or alter the internal contents of any file. Altering or restructuring a file is a very dangerous thing to do as one would have to have a very intimate knowledge of a given file structure and be able to detect changes as the various databases evolved with new releases. Therefore, any holes or ‘records marked as deleted’ within the database, prior to defragmentation are still present.
The tools for Microsoft Exchange (ESE and EDB Utilities) deal with this internal record fragmentation by rearranging the internal records/indexes on the fly when possible, and at times requiring a whole new copy of the database to be created and each record copied to the new file. Even if this copy is done to a freshly formatted volume or a defragmented volume with a free space chunk large enough to contain the entire database, it’s quite likely that this new copy will become fragmented. It is strongly recommended to run Diskeeper® on a daily basis to ensure peak performance from your database and email servers.
Learn more, read: How you can improve your Email Server performance »
Fragmentation and Defragmentation Testing and White papers
Selecting an Effective Defragmentation Solution
While traditional defragmentation methods may have once been standard practice, modern Windows systems require a more sophisticated approach to combat fragmentation effectively. Despite hardware upgrades, the accumulation of fragmented data on a computer’s storage device can significantly degrade system performance, leading to slowdowns and potential crashes. So, what’s the best solution in today’s landscape?
The most efficient and contemporary approach to addressing fragmentation is real-time prevention. This capability is essential for sustaining peak system speed and reliability, regardless of the system’s workload.
Rather than relying on traditional “defragmentation tools,” today’s systems necessitate solutions that seamlessly prevent fragmented data from being written to the storage device. It’s crucial that these solutions operate without monopolizing system resources during the process.
When selecting a performance optimization solution, prioritize one that is trusted, reliable, and certified to ensure effectiveness and provide peace of mind.
IntelliWrite® Fragmentation Prevention Technology
Historically, fragmentation has been addressed proactively, after it has already happened through the defragmentation process. In the “early days”, fragmentation was addressed by transferring files to clean hard drives. Then manual defrag programs were introduced. The next step was scheduled defragmenters with varying degrees of automation. Truly automatic defrag was finally achieved with the development of InvisiTasking® technology by Condusiv Technologies in 2007.
However, in spite of all the progress made with defrag methods, when fragmentation occurs, the system is wasting precious I/O resources by writing non-contiguous files to scattered free spaces across the disk and then secondly, using more I/O resources to defrag. Clearly the best strategy is to prevent the problem before it happens in the first place and always work with clean, fast storage.
Based on knowledge of the Windows file system, IntelliWrite technology controls the file system operation and prevents the fragmentation that would otherwise occur.
Key Features:
- Significantly improves system performance above the levels achieved with automatic defragmentation alone.
- The improvement will be particularly significant for busy servers / virtual systems on which background/scheduled defragmentation has limited time slots in which to run. In extreme cases this can make a difference between being able to eradicate fragmentation or not.
- Substantially prevents file fragmentation before it happens, up to 85% or more.
- Can be enabled / disabled per individual volumes.
- Can be run in coordination with automatic defragmentation (strongly recommended for optimal performance), or independently.
- Supports NTFS and FAT file systems on Microsoft Windows operating systems.
- Overall lower system resource usage and consequently lower energy consumption.
Key Benefits:
- Prevents most fragmentation before it happens
- Improves file write performance
- Saves energy at the same time that improves performance (5.4% in controlled tests)
- Compatible and interoperable with other storage management solutions
IntelliWrite reduces drastically the effects of fragmentation on any system running in the Windows Operating System by preventing the fragmentation before it happens. This will automatically represent an improvement in system speed, performance, reliability, stability and longevity.
InvisiTasking® background processing
InvisiTasking was coined from “invisible” and “multitasking”, and this amazing technological breakthrough promises to change the way the world operates and maintains their computer systems. InvisiTasking allows computers to do something that has never been done before – to run at maximum peak performance, continuously, without interfering with system performance or resources – even when demand is at its highest!
InvisiTasking allows Condusiv’s software to eliminate fragmentation on the fly, in real time, so that fragmentation never has a chance to interfere with the system. Best of all, InvisiTasking does this automatically, without the need for any input from the user – regardless of the size of the network. Whether it’s just one PC or thousands just install Condusiv and the software will take care of the rest!
It’s important to note that InvisiTasking is far more advanced than any previous low priority I/O approaches that do “I/O throttling” in an effort to reduce resource conflict. InvisiTasking, through the use of its advanced technology, goes beyond just I/O in order to address system resource u
sage using a pro-active approach. InvisiTasking checks to make sure the operation that occurs takes place invisibly, with true transparency while running in the background.
Solution to Eliminate Fragmentation and Speed up Computer Systems
Diskeeper has been increasing PC and Server performance by eliminating and preventing fragmentation for millions of global customers for decades. Diskeeper also includes caching technology for faster-than-new computer performance.
All of Diskeeper’s features and functionality are now included in DymaxIO.
DymaxIO is the most cost-effective, easy, and indispensable solution for fast data, increased throughput, and accelerated I/O performance so systems and applications run at peak performance for as long as possible.
To learn more visit condusiv.com/dymaxio