| Index | Recent Threads | Unanswered Threads | Who's Active | Guidelines | Search |
 |
World Community Grid Forums
Category: Support
Forum: BOINC Agent Support
Thread: Defraging your drive and BOINC performance. |
| No member browsing this thread |
|
Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 8
|
|
| Author |
|
|
vlado101
Senior Cruncher Joined: Jul 23, 2013 Post Count: 226 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
|
Hello all,
----------------------------------------I was wondering if defragmenting your drive on a weekly basis is recommended to improve performance of WCG crunching. Has anyone tested to see how much of a performance boost this might be? Does running boinc projects and WCG make your drive more fragmented? Also I have heard that defragmenting through safe mode yields better results, however I have never attempted to do that. Can anyone confirm if there is not much difference between doing that in safe mode vs normal. Thank you for your help.  |
||
|
|
Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
I can't speak from any deep technical knowledge, and I have never explicitly run a defrag just for WCG. All I can tell you is that I wait for Patch Tuesday then, once Mr Softy has done his bit, I check all my browser plug-ins and other high risk things like Acrobat Reader and Java for updates, then once all that is done I run a defrag and then re-boot. That seems to keep my systems running perfectly happily.
|
||
|
|
Sabrina Tarson
Advanced Cruncher United States Joined: Jun 27, 2012 Post Count: 149 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
|
I don't think it would help much because (as I understand it) all the data you process is sent back and deleted (along with which I think the EXE that ran it) and when you download more jobs, it (redownloads) all of it to the disk.
----------------------------------------Therefore, I would think that Defragging would be pointless cause the data is only there while it processes, and then is deleted once it is done. There would be nothing to really fragment in the short (1-24 hours) term of project crunching. |
||
|
|
Barnsley_Tatts
Senior Cruncher Joined: Nov 3, 2005 Post Count: 291 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
|
Interesting question!
----------------------------------------I have WCG installed on an old 8Gb hard drive. I moved it from the SSD as I don't want to put extra strain on it. SSD don't need or shouldn't be defragged - I also have a 2Tb hdd which I use for my downloads and other stuff. Anyway, I decided to defrag the 2Tb HDD using O&O Defrag software. The HDD had about 900Gb of movies & TV shows and other crap. O&O advised me the drive was only 4.7% fragmented, only took a few mins to do. Thought I'd check the HDD with WCG, and thats all thats on the drive. O&O reported the drive was 217% fragmented! Gave it a defrag, and that was that. Just checked it now, and it's 186.73% fragmented! Thats in 36 hours! Gone from nothing to that. Whether a defrag speeds up WCG, no idea, but it must help to have a nice, orderly drive!  |
||
|
|
Jim1348
Veteran Cruncher USA Joined: Jul 13, 2009 Post Count: 1066 Status: Offline Project Badges:
|
I don't think it would help much because (as I understand it) all the data you process is sent back and deleted (along with which I think the EXE that ran it) and when you download more jobs, it (redownloads) all of it to the disk. Therefore, I would think that Defragging would be pointless cause the data is only there while it processes, and then is deleted once it is done. There would be nothing to really fragment in the short (1-24 hours) term of project crunching. Yes, I put the BOINC data folder on a ramdisk (12 GB), due to the high write requirements of CEP2. The size of the BOINC folder stays within a certain limit (around 5 GB) for running CEP2 on all 8 cores of an Ivy Bridge i7-3770 when setting the work buffer to 0.5 + 0.5 days. So the old work gets deleted when the new work is downloaded. There is no point in defragging it at all. |
||
|
|
Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
I like the method Apis Tintinnambulator uses, although with modern high capacity disks a reasonable defrag check will only do a defrag once every 2 or 3 months. Deciding this manually will almost certainly overdo it. Also, WCG will not be sped up by more than a few hundred milliseconds (just my guess, but decades of background behind it). Back in the days of 40 MB disks, this was important and utilities like Spinrite were worth buying. Now, just schedule checks monthly and do what the check suggests.
Lawrence |
||
|
|
keithhenry
Ace Cruncher Senile old farts of the world ....uh.....uh..... nevermind Joined: Nov 18, 2004 Post Count: 18667 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
|
I defrag every week. I have found that crunching rapidly speeds up the rate that the HD gets fragmented. I haven't noticed any significant difference with crunching but I have found that Windows is a HECK of a lot more stable as a result. From that perspective, fewer problems means less downtime means more crunching.
---------------------------------------- |
||
|
|
vlado101
Senior Cruncher Joined: Jul 23, 2013 Post Count: 226 Status: Offline Project Badges:
|
Awesome. Want to thank all that commented.
---------------------------------------- |
||
|
|
|