Degrag is like a once a year job.
NTFS shouldn’t suffer so bad, and of course the OS can be made smarter, even with a dumb filesystem…
Why not reboot the application instead of the server ? Don’t answer that, you told us not to ask…
Could you separate the application from the data; reboot the application every 5 minutes but keep the data and temporary files on a persistent volume?
I’m back!
Here’s what happens…
We have this application that historically ran like shit. It’s an NT4 terminal emulator that performs screen scrapes to move data from one interface to another. If the application is inactive for 5 minutes, it’s assumed something is broken, and the machine will reboot. Every time the application begins a cycle, the counter for rebooting is reset to 5 minutes.
So.
The defrag scheduled task was set to run only during periods of system inactivity, and as we learned above, a period of system inactivity triggered a reboot. So defrag never ran.
Anyways.
I added some RAM, defragged the disk, and it’s running better. I’m leaving the defrag schedule to run at startup. I have no reason to believe it can be defragged too often, and it’s not impacting the system at all the way it running now.