Hello: I have: Red Hat 8.0 with kernel-2.4.18-19.8.0 (latest). EXT3 filesystem. My system is now getting slow. I have never experienced this with SUSE 7.3 with Reiser FS. Is it due to fragmentation? If yes is it a defragmenter for EXT3? If no, where else should I look? Thanks for being specific. Linuxuser.

You can get a defragger for linux, have a look on freshmeat.net. It may not be that at all. I've heard that RedHat 8 can be a drain on your PC if it's not highly speced. If you have lots of small files, I think reiser deals with them faster than ext2/3. You could always try moving the files to another partition, reformatting the first one and then move them back again to defrag them.

There's no need to EVER defrag a hard drive in linux. Never - ever. Yeah, there's a defrag utility available, but it's stupid because the highest any unix fs will defrag is about 3%, which is nothing. Ext3, Ext2, Reiserfs, etc are not FAT32 file systems. FAT32 fs are constantly breaking down because like everything Microsoft produces, it's 100% crap! Try installing the default options (If you decide to re-install. It's usually better to install as little during the initial install), or "su" to root and perform the "/sbin/hdparm /dev/hda" command, and check the performance of your disk. You can set some parameters with hdparm that will iprove your hard drive performance. Also, how much ram do you have? This could be a problem with RH 8. SuSe requires 64MB of RAM as a minimum, and recommends 128MB. Redhat 8.0, requires AT LEAST 128MB of Ram, and recommends 192MB. That's a considerable difference between the two, and no amount of swap will make up for the performance loss. If the latter is the case, you'll serve yourself better by installing more ram, if your Motherboard specs permit you to. I have umpteen versions of linux that I have installed at one time or another. Of all these, Redhat pretty much installed itself, and ran the most efficient, with the exception of Slackware 8.1, which is just plain solid. I hardly think your problem lies with the distro. I'd bet money that you are pressing the limits of your system's memeory.

I have seen a slow down with Linux 8.0 as well. I am currently on 7.3. You can try the hdparm technique to speed up harddrive access. ex: hdparm -c1 -d1 -u1 /dev/hda will speed up harddisk master on primary controller. You place it in a startup file though, it is not persistent.