Vista Defragment Tool

[Frank]

Shane Milward wrote:
.....if you got a problem with people's advice, deal with it somewhere
else...



Oh you mean just like you are doing?
Great advice, thanks.
Frank

 

[Shane Milward]

Oh you mean just like you are doing?

Great advice, thanks.
Frank

No I am not and I don't want a dispute, I'm just saying, if you wanna argue
with everything everyones saying, why come on here. Now cmon Frank, be nice
hehe

Shane

 

[Frank]

No I am not and I don't want a dispute, I'm just saying, if you wanna
argue with everything everyones saying, why come on here. Now cmon
Frank, be nice hehe

Oh, I am nice.
But I refuse to put up with linux losing, FUD spreading, Vista hating
trolls like capin' crunch et al.
Frank

 

[Shane Milward]

hehe, you shouldn't take it personal.
What's Capin Crunch btw?
maybe I took you wrong, U aint a bad guy really are u. for the record, i do
like vista although i can't comment of linux coz I don't know what it is -
operating system? : ) i know, i am rather thick - don't agree with that
though Franky!

Shane

 

[notaguru]

As notaguru said, the defrag in Vista wasn't designed to be super fast.
If it were super fast, your system would likely be unusable while Defrag
is running. This is one of the reasons why people were so trained to
start XP defrag and then walk away for the computer. I mean, who here
hasn't started XP's defrag on their work computer and then went home for
the evening? Or started XP Defrag at home before going to bed? With
Vista, the automatic defrag runs while the computer is not in use and
will stop if you start using the computer. If you choose to run Defrag
manually, it runs as low priority and shouldn't interfere with your use
of the computer. Yes, the tradeoff is that defrag takes longer, but if
you aren't using the computer anyway, who cares? And over time the
system stays in a relatively defragmented state so that when defrag does
run, the process finishes sooner.

That being said, I know we are working on performance improvements for
Defrag.

This seems pretty definitive. As Jill says, the penalty for
replacing Vista defrag is an unusable computer while a
third-party utility is working. Unless someone can show that the
defrag RESULT is somehow better with that additional defrag
utility, I'll stick with Vista.

From my viewpoint, Vista is working very well. According to the
HELP file, the smoke emanating from my new laptop is at the
desired color: Gates-Green.

 

[Milhouse Van Houten]

OK, but how does that explain why the *scheduled* defrag is slow? If it's
designed to back-off when the computer is in use, shouldn't it step on the
peddle when it's not? Surely you're not saying that it's deliberately slow
without cause. I even tried removing the "-i" switch so that it would never
pause, but that didn't make a difference, suggesting that it wasn't pausing
even with it (which makes sense in the middle of the night).

It almost feels like the -w switch is in effect (see link), but it's not. If
it was doing a "complete" defrag that would at least explain the difference
from XP (did XP's do a complete defrag?; if so, it's even better than I
thought), but that's not the case.
http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/archive/2006/10/19/a-quick-note-about-defrag-exe-parameters.aspx

I know the version of Defrag up through XP was based on Diskeeper. Is the
one in Vista a continuation of that or a new start based on your own code?

Thanks

 

[Ray Rogers]

This seems pretty definitive. As Jill says, the penalty for replacing
Vista defrag is an unusable computer while a third-party utility is
working. Unless someone can show that the defrag RESULT is somehow better
with that additional defrag utility, I'll stick with Vista.

From my viewpoint, Vista is working very well. According to the HELP file,
the smoke emanating from my new laptop is at the desired color:
Gates-Green.

Well, I'll tell you this. I've been running Vista for a few months without
any attempt at manual defragging, I just let Vista do it's own thing. I
downloaded AusLogics defragger and used that for a run. It reported that
there were 425 files or so, out of about 20,000 that were fragmented. After
it had run through, I checked the report and found that of those 425 files,
most of them were temp, deleted and Internet temp files, hardly a
performance drag.
So I'm confident that Vista's defrag is doing a good job and not wasting
needless energy defragging useless files.

And, they're making it better

 

[Jill Zoeller [MSFT]]

These are good questions--I'm waiting for a defrag developer to follow up.

 

[Daze N. Knights]

Both Diskeeper and PerfectDisk will defragment the MFT, metafiles, and
the page file at bootup, before Windows loads. Does Vista's native
defrag tool do this?

 

[Jill Zoeller [MSFT]]

As for the scheduled defrag being slow,
1.) Low IO priority
2.) Snapshots happen in the background
3.) Other things may happen while the computer is idle, so See 1.)
4.) New algorithms which often yield better defragmentation sometimes yield
worse overall defragmentation time.

 

[Jill Zoeller [MSFT]]

OK, I got two answers, one longer than the other. Here's the second:

Defrag always runs with low-priority.
Even if the computer is not in use we do not want defrag having too high a
priority. The is because the computer may be performing other tasks, for
example:

The user may be recording a TV show in media center.
This is a very disk intensive task that is time sensitive. We don't have
defrag pre-empting this I/O constantly.

Removing the -I switch won't stop defrag from being killed when the user
becomes active, because the scheduled task is configured to kill defrag.exe
when the user becomes active.

The -w switch is not in effect. It is simply slow due to one of the
following:
1. Low priority I/O
2. High fragmentation on the disk
3. Low free space on the disk

 

[Milhouse Van Houten]

Thanks for the clarification. In my case, it has to be the low-priority I/O
doing it, since fragmentation is not high and free space is not low. Based
on your first message, I was going to go off looking for a way to adjust the
Defrag task such that I/O isn't low-priority (I'm not running Media Center),
but it sounds like that's not possible.

 

[Daze N. Knights]

No answer in over two weeks, because the answer is No?

 

[Hank Arnold]

What makes you think turning off restore points will improve performance??

Regards,
Hank Arnold

 

[jsnapper2]

No answer in over two weeks, because the answer is No?





- Show quoted text -

Vista does the MFT, but not the page file and not the meta files.
Diskeeper does not do all the metadata (e.g. $logfile, etc.) and
doesn't report on it. Diskeeper also does not report on free space.

 

[Daze N. Knights]

Interesting. Are you sure that Vista does the MFT? As I understood it,
defragging the MFT had to be done *before* Windows loads, and I see no
evidence that Vista does that.

No answer in over two weeks, because the answer is No?

BothDiskeeperand PerfectDisk will defragment the MFT, metafiles, and
the page file at bootup, before Windows loads. Does Vista's native
defrag tool do this?
Jill Zoeller [MSFT] wrote:
As notaguru said, the defrag in Vista wasn't designed to be super
fast. If it were super fast, your system would likely be unusable
while Defrag is running. This is one of the reasons why people were so
trained to start XP defrag and then walk away for the computer. I
mean, who here hasn't started XP's defrag on their work computer and
then went home for the evening? Or started XP Defrag at home before
going to bed? With Vista, the automatic defrag runs while the computer
is not in use and will stop if you start using the computer. If you
choose to run Defrag manually, it runs as low priority and shouldn't
interfere with your use of the computer. Yes, the tradeoff is that
defrag takes longer, but if you aren't using the computer anyway, who
cares? And over time the system stays in a relatively defragmented
state so that when defrag does run, the process finishes sooner.
That being said, I know we are working on performance improvements for
Defrag.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Vista does the MFT, but not the page file and not the meta files.
Diskeeper does not do all the metadata (e.g. $logfile, etc.) and
doesn't report on it. Diskeeper also does not report on free space.

 

[cquirke (MVP Windows shell/user)]

I'd like to know, too.

For example, I have a 150G file mass on NTFS that has been debulked
down to 12G (OS and core apps only, rest moved off C. Does the MFT
stay bloated with the old information forever?

Jill Zoeller [MSFT] wrote:

As notaguru said, the defrag in Vista wasn't designed to be super
fast. If it were super fast, your system would likely be unusable
while Defrag is running. This is one of the reasons why people were so
trained to start XP defrag and then walk away for the computer.

Another good reason is that files in use couldn't be defragged, and
the more you do, the more files are in use. And because you're using
them, they're prolly the files you'd like speeded up anyway

Also, I still have the impression that file system checking and
defragging are tasks best done while the file system doesn't have
other things writing changes to it. Since XP, this doesn't seem to be
an issue with defrag; are there any tech articles on how and why?

Some of us may prefer to avoid things starting up and fiddling with
the PC when it is idle, for various reasons. It would be good if
there were a "front door" to manage this sort of underfootware tasks,
and elect to use the "stop everything, foreground task doing major
earthworks as fast as it can" approach instead.

For example, if I'm working in conditions where bad exits are likely
(dodgy mains, iffy battery) then I want the PC doing nothing when I am
doing nothing, so that there are no pending files trashed if bad exit.

Please give us a decent UI for it! It's insane, not being able to see
a map of the file set. A great enhancement would be the ability to
point to a cluster (or band, if aggregated a la XP) and see, in the
status bar, what file or structure this bit belongs to.

Also - are you (Jill) the same team that does AutoChk and ChkDsk?

-------------------- ----- ---- --- -- - - - -

Tip Of The Day:
To disable the 'Tip of the Day' feature...

 

[cquirke (MVP Windows shell/user)]

What makes you think turning off restore points will improve performance??

As the same engine underlies "Previous Versions", do you get much
benefit if System Restore is disabled, but Shadow Copy is left on?

My approach has been to kill SR on volumes other than C:, and restrict
it to small capacity (and thus only recent RPs) on C:

In XP, it was a constant pain (not to mention a menace to sick HDs)
that the duhfault was "SR on, waste as much space as possible" for all
newly-detected HD volumes. Vista's got that right, at least

Unfortunately, there isn't an easy way to control space used by the
Shadow Copy system, or specifically to control the SR aspect of it
(e.g. limit RP retention to X days and/or use up to Z Megs)

But if you really want gratuitous underfootware bloat, consider that
"Previous Versions" functionality will build and maintain such files
even in Vista editions that do not UI this to the user. In such
cases, upgrading the OS to an edition which offers "Previous
Versions", will expose previous versions that were created before that
edition was installed. I can see security/privacy issues there...

-------------------- ----- ---- --- -- - - - -

Tip Of The Day:
To disable the 'Tip of the Day' feature...

 

[CJW]

On a different note:

Is defrage always turned on? Is there a way to turn it off, if that is
the case? I have a dual-boot version and don't want Vista defragging
all over the place.

 

[Daze N. Knights]

CJW wrote:
don't want Vista defragging all over the place.
LOL!