23 replies to this topic

[bman]

One of the things that always bothered me about Windows was after awhile things got slow or bugged up.

Because installing, uninstalling, changing and editing things cause the drive and everything to get confused, why it's good to wipe and start over once in awhile.

It's also the reason I started minimizing the applications I use, and moving more things to the cloud/web.


My question is though, is Linux the same way? Or does the system work differently then that? Will installing apps, removing apps, and so forth cause problems long term like windows?

[LaP]

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Because installing, uninstalling, changing and editing things cause the drive and everything to get confused, why it's good to wipe and start over once in awhile.

Then use portable apps as much as you can. Problem solved. When i can avoid installing an app i'm quite happy. I hate the registry.

[bman]

Yea I already stated I take care when choosing apps.

That was not my question.

[Billus]

Try defragging although it should be automatically set up on Vista ->. I've never expierenced any slow downs after time since Vista. Also make sure you have enough free space (20gb or more should easily suffice). Truthfully, I only found this noticeable on XP but not on previous Windows versions 2000, 98.

Edit: Linux woudn't/shouldn't slow down no matter how many applications you install. I find it keeps itself cleaner than Windows although Vista, 7 and 8 drastically improved on this.

[Michael Lacey]

Linux won't require defragging since it uses a different type of filesystem.
Other than that, any operating system will be slowed down by an excess of background processes running. It's all about maintenance and keeping it lean. The whole Windows rot thing is not very true I find. Loaded registries and hard disk space don't affect performance much. That said, feel free to run tweaking.com windows repair and check the health of your hard drive with something like HDD Sentinel; you could be experiencing a bigger issue.

[firey]

I've never experienced slow downs on Linux personally.

[cybertimber2008]

You might experience a slow down on linux as you add programs and services, but it should decrease as you remove thing. There is some issues with uninstalling however - when you install program x and it needs dependency y, it will install x and y. If you go to remove x one day, it won't necessarily remove y, so some manual cleanup there might be good.

[+ViperAFK]

I don't really experience this issue in windows or linux these days. You can slow down any OS if you add too many startup items and background tasks. Linux applications to tend to uninstall cleaner than windows applications though due to the unified package management.

[The_Decryptor]

Michael Lacey, on 06 January 2013 - 05:31, said:

Linux won't require defragging since it uses a different type of filesystem.
...

Linux (and OS X, etc.) still require defrags, the only way they could avoid it was if the filesystem defragged each file when it was modified (Which is too slow, so nobody does it outside of certain areas)

[Newinko]

The_Decryptor, on 06 January 2013 - 22:20, said:

Linux (and OS X, etc.) still require defrags, the only way they could avoid it was if the filesystem defragged each file when it was modified (Which is too slow, so nobody does it outside of certain areas)

That is not entirely correct. On HFS+ volumes Mac OS X defragments files smaller than 20 MB on-the-fly. Defragmentation as such is not required on Mac OS X, Apple indicates as much (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1375) and independent reports have as well (http://osxbook.com/s...gmentation.html).

Linux, depending on the file system, is less fragmentation-resistent, but ext4 is said to be. Anyway, thankfully, SSDs will make the defragmentation maintenance operation one of a bygone era.

[darkrats]

I did a clean install of Windows, tweaked it to how I wanted it to look and run (no system restore, no multiple users etc), then add just a few basic programs like Office, and then ghosted the partition (to both a second hidden partition and to a USB key). Now I play around with my computer as much as I want to, even infecting it with viruses on purpose to see what damage they do, and then in only a few minutes I can restore it back to a clean working system. I also never install programs that insist on starting up when windows starts up. If I can disable them from auto-starting, I don't use them. I find an alternative program that will do the same thing. Only a hardware upgrade will make mine run faster.

Meant to say "if I can't disable them".

[The_Decryptor]

Newinko, on 06 January 2013 - 22:42, said:

That is not entirely correct. On HFS+ volumes Mac OS X defragments files smaller than 20 MB on-the-fly. Defragmentation as such is not required on Mac OS X, Apple indicates as much (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1375) and independent reports have as well (http://osxbook.com/s...gmentation.html).

Linux, depending on the file system, is less fragmentation-resistent, but ext4 is said to be. Anyway, thankfully, SSDs will make the defragmentation maintenance operation one of a bygone era.

As mentioned, that's only for files 20MB or smaller, and it's not part of the filesystem, it's OS logic (No functional difference to the end user, but there's a logical break). And EXT4 is only resistant to fragmentation as long as you pre-allocate the files (yay extents) to the end length (same with other file systems). If you write a solid 20MB of data, then write 1KB to the middle, it's not going to be able to actually place it in the middle of the 20MB block, it'll be placed somewhere else.

[Newinko]

The_Decryptor, on 06 January 2013 - 23:21, said:

As mentioned, that's only for files 20MB or smaller, and it's not part of the filesystem, it's OS logic (No functional difference to the end user, but there's a logical break).

Splitting the OS and its proprietary filesystem into two separate entities is a complicated proposition, seeing how HFS+ is strictly a Mac filesystem, and its implementation has been improved as OS X evolved (is HFS+ journaling an OS or a filesystem feature, for instance? if a new feature of NTFS such as Quotas or Compression is released together with a specific version of Windows and not backported, does it matter that it is technically ntfs.sys and not Windows if one can't be used without the other?). The defragmentation-on-copy is implemented on the kernel level. OS X uses an assortment of other features such as delayed allocation to make defragmentation a moot point. In normal circumstances there is simply not a sufficient performance gain to justify the wasted time and extensive disk activity caused by defragmentation.

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And EXT4 is only resistant to fragmentation as long as you pre-allocate the files (yay extents) to the end length (same with other file systems). If you write a solid 20MB of data, then write 1KB to the middle, it's not going to be able to actually place it in the middle of the 20MB block, it'll be placed somewhere else.

Even if a terribly-written program would decide to do that, defragmentation would probably do more damage than it's worth as a whole to a Linux system unless the program is extremely well written to take into account that files are spread as a strategy to resist fragmentation and improve seek times. The benefits of manual defragmentation, at least under modern versions of Linux and especially Mac OS X, are not readily apparent under normal use. Even under Windows, the built-in defragmentation tool has become less and less thorough because there is a time/performance gained ratio at play here.

[LUTZIFER]

To me it's a myth. If it was necessary to reformat all the time, I would have just stopped using computers altogether.
I do way to many tweaks to be redoing them all the time, nor do I like reinstalling.
People just assume that cuz after you do a fresh install, the computer is faster. Well obviously, there's nothing on it.
It's very simple to keep your computer in top-notch shape without the need to re-format.
Most people that have computers that get sluggish have a crapload of things that start up with windows and are running in the background.
The best thing to do is think... do I really need that, is it worth the RAM it's using, etc. etc.
Rule of thumb... if it's important, keep it. If it's crap, get rid of it. Simple as that.

[redvamp128]

Well Linux (Ubuntu) has a janitor program that can remove old unused kernel's as well as programs that are no longer needed. Also when you update it will tell you there are some that are not needed. As far as fragmentation- The way Linux handles files it is not really a necessity to have one. ( I personally still have an install done on a 800mhz PIII with 512mb of memory from 5 years ago and it still is fast and a slow hard drive.

not to mention-- removal is easier-for the leftovers.

Show hidden files - then go into the (user_name) directory find the one you removed (then delete the folder) since setting files are the only thing most keep when removed and don't take up no more space than a few kilobytes anyhow.