Defraggler Takes Too Long

I am having trouble with Defraggler just running and running.

I use several maintenance programs each week, with some of them doing defragging . . . none take near as long as Defraggler.

With the release of 2.20.989 I was hopeful that it would be quicker . . . unfortunately, apparently not.

Recently, I ran it starting with 723 Total Fragments . . . after 4 hours it still had 536, with the remaining time showing >1 day. (I do surf the web while it is running but do not download anything else during this time.)

Why does it take so long?

How can I speed it up?

from a maintenance point of view, a few hundred fragmented files is most likely nothing to worry about and unlikely to impact performance.

considering the OS has around 100,000 files and Program Files has about 30,000 - a few hundred fragged files is of little consequence.

and would only be a slightly higher consequence if the file that was fragmented was actually addressed frequently.

of greater concern would be the higher disk I/O you are performing and the potential downside of that.

and running multiple programs with defrag capabilities would simply be undoing the file management of the previous defrag program.

no two follow the same algorithm for repacking files.

as to the time taken, have you ticked the Stop VSS and Exclude restore point options?

have you tried running DF with the PC in Safe Mode to verify it's not some background task (ie: AV software) causing the slowness?

I updated my 2 Win7 PCs this past week to ver 2.20 (same option settings). Normally, I defrag once a week and both drives are about 1% fragmented.

When I started defragging them this morning, both PCs were nowhere near as complete after a few hours. It was obvious both PCs were going to take much longer than with previous versions.

I reinstalled ver 2.19 and I've restarted the defrag. I'll see if there is any difference or if it my imagination.

The defrag with ver 2.19 just finished on both PCs, less than an hour from my previous post. Much faster than ver 2.20.

Whatever changes were made to ver 2.20, it really slowed it down. For now, I'm staying with ver 2.19.

I started to do a post Win7 Pro installation defrag after I had just installed Defraggler 2.20. It ran extremely slow and it didn't appear to be defragmenting anything after a few hours. I uninstalled 2.20 and went back to 2.19; that one completed in short order. On another note, on my WinXP web server, 2.19 would not defrag; it kept doing the benchmark checks no matter what I did to the defrag settings. Since my settings are always in the ini file, I just uninstalled 2.19, went back to 2.18, which, I assume, used the same ini file settings since the same settings were still there when 2.18 started, and everything worked fine. On another XPPro machine, 2.19 is working fine, but I have never asked for a benchmark test. Just a guess on my part, but it almost appears that once you ask for a benchmark, it gets "stuck" in that mode (???). Don't hold me to that, but I've seen other forum comments with regards to the benchmark and no defragging and there may be some bones in the closet relating to initiation of benchmark testing . . . I will try going back to 2.19 on the web server machine and will check the (x) Disable Benchmark After Defrag option to see what that does. Stop VSS is always checked.

A possible suggestion for the benchmark check graphics display. I always optimize my Defraggler real estate by using Custom View, 4 x 4 Plain Blocks to get a large number of blocks of a viewable resolution. Once the defrag starts, I drag the lower statistics part of the screen display down as low as it will go WITHOUT losing the path of the current file being defragged. I have found, however, that if the benchmark check is done, that part of the display will not fit into the same vertical height. The drive bars auto adjust their vertical width dimension to fit inside this display area very well; one of my systems has 4 drives, and the bars all shrunk in width, which indicates a programmer who thought ahead :). If the data to the left of the bar graphs (Analyzed, Defrag Executions, Files Defragged, Fragments Reduced, Longest Defrag Execution and Last Defrag Execution) could be double line spaced instead of triple line spaced, we could gain enough real estate to not require resizing of the lower statistics part of the screen display.

mta

"have you ticked the Stop VSS and Exclude restore point options?"

Mta, thanks for the suggestions . . . I have now done both and will see if that helps this coming week when I plan to run Defraggler again.