Defraggler is VERY slow and use a lot of CPU

[Furball]

Been suspecting for a while now that Defraggler isn't a good defragmentation tool. Today I did a test and compared it with Smart Defrag and my suspicion is true.

The picture show Smart Defrag defragmenting C: drive while Defraggler is defragmenting E: drive. Both drives have equal size. Look at the CPU and ram usage. It's night and day! Defragglers takes hours to defrag and uses one CPU core 100% (I have a four core CPU with hyper threading which translates to ~12% is 100% usage of one logical processor). And look at the ram difference! Smart Defrag is super fast compared to Defraggler and doesn't use up as much ram. So there must be at least one bug in Defraggler.

Edited December 10, 2021 by Furball
Better title

[nukecad]

Without knowing just what each defragmenter is actually doing comparisions such as that are meaningless.
They could be doing entirely different things.

There are two things that are commonly called 'defragmenting', but they are very different and one takes a lot more resources than the other.

'Defragmentation' proper means getting you files into one piece each, so they can be read slightly faster.
'Consolidation' is also commonly called defragmenting and means getting your files into the smallest number of possible clusters on the disc, which may (will) actually fragment the files themselves. That's the one that takes more resources, it's not realy needed on todays larger discs, and indeed it will take much longer on todays larger discs.
(When most people talk about defragmenting they are actually thinking about consolidation, that's simply because the software has been (wrongly) calling it that for years, but user needs have changed over time as discs got bigger so have lots of free space available).

By default Defraggler does a combination of both consolidation and defragmentation, but you can also specify one or the other.

Try doing a 'file only' defragment in Defraggler which will use less resources and complete quicker.
To do that:
Open defraggler and analyse the drive.
Click on 'View Files' or click on the 'Files' tab.
Select the tickbox at the top of the list to select everything found.
Click on 'Defrag Checked'.

That will just defragment the files without trying to consolidate the whole drive.
So it will be quicker and use less resources.

Like any tool that can be used in multiple ways what you get out of it depends on knowing how to use it in the best way for you.