The Daves Collective

Defragging and scientology, DEC and Microsoft
2003-12-10 21:51

Why is the Win2K defragmenter such a pile of poo? Why does it say it needs >15% free to do the biz, even when the biggest single file on the partition is much smaller than the available free space? And why, at 17% free, does it still moan that it only has 8% "available" to it? Why is the fs still fragged to buggery when it's finished defragging, but then if you run it again straight away it defrags a lot more - so why doesn't the sodding thing iterate until it's done a proper job? Why, when you run it on a partition with no reported fragments at all, does it sometimes actually produce a couple of fragments?

Because it was written by "fully trained scientologists, computer skills desirable but not a prerequisite". That's why.

The Win2K defragmenter is a deliberately impaired version of Diskeeper, licensed by MS from a firm called Executive Software who are so intertwined with the scientology racket that the German government threw a wobbly about Win2K until MS grudgingly coughed up a KB article (in German) on removing the defragger. As far as I can tell there are no free-gratis or free-libre alternatives.

If, dear reader, you might indulge the reminiscences of an old fart, ten or fifteen years ago Executive Software was notorious to VMS sysadmins for their, ummm, tenacious sales pitch. This was back when Diskeeper was a defragger not for NTFS but for VMS (in competition with a product called Rabbit-4, or was it Rabbit-7, anyway they eventually renamed it Perfectdisk).

And that leads me to ponder whether NTFS is, fundamentally, a knockoff of an outdated version of the VMS ODS-2 filesystem. Apparently I'm not the only one to wonder. Here's my evidence: (1) both Diskeeper and Perfectdisk were repurposed from VMS to NTFS with apparent ease; (2) the placement of the green NTFS "system files", as shown in the Win2K defragger, is a dead giveaway; (3) both FSes fragment early, and then the performance of each does the same bellyflop. (Incidentally I have similar suspicions about the so-called AdvFS in OSF/1, err Dec Unix, err Doomed64; it's funny how it has the same tunables as VMS... trust me guys, don't be fooled by its name, use UFS instead.)

Certainly the NT kernel is just a knockoff of a primordial version of the VMS kernel. It is a matter of record that VMS progenitor Dave Cutler flit from DEC to MS and there didst begat NT in the image of VMS. But lo, primordial VMS had a dire VM that paged too soon and thrashed the pagefile even unto death at the first sign of memory pressure, and sure enough, open one too many apps on my token Win2K box and the IDE disk makes EXACTLY the same sort of rattling rolling rhythms as the old RA80s used to do ten minutes before the valediction on the console printer. DEC did manage (post Cutler) to make the VM more tunable. Perhaps MS should license a deliberately impaired AUTOGEN from HP? Is Carly a scientologist?

By the way, lots of kewl VAX photos here.

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