GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 438574
gparted slowed down when moving partition
Last modified: 2008-08-07 02:18:55 UTC
I moved (right to left) &growed ~10GB partition. it took ~10 minutes, I was delighted. Then I (in practice: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=438514) moved 60GB partition, from right to left. It took ~6 hours maybe. I noticed that while moving&growing the first, gparted used large chunks, while on the latter it used (finally) chunks of 128 (bytes?). Of course it is a dream-wish, but it would be great if gparted could be speeded up on moving operations (especially from right to left -- no data overlapping really).
Having the same problem *right now* with the Ubuntu Live CD, perhaps it uses a compatibility filesysten driver. Used blocksize is 64. Solutions: 1. If estimated time is longer than 1h ask the user: "Do you really want to start a uncancellable 7h+ operation NOW?" 2. I have 2Gb RAM. Why not read 1Gb sequentially to RAM, then write to disk? Would only take 100 transactions instead of 3261928 and hard disk arm bearing would say thank you. Hey, even MS-DOS's xcopy did that.
A problem was discovered in the algorithm that attempts to choose an optimum block size for moving or copying partitions. The new enhanced algorithm will benchmark times with all of the block size possibilities. Then it will select the block size that took the smallest time to copy. The previous algorithm would start with a small block size, test the time of a copy, and then try the next larger block size. As soon as the next larger block size took longer than the previous one, the algorithm would stop and declare the previous block size as the optimal size for the copy operation. In theory this would appear to be a good algorithm, but due to anomalies in benchmark times the algorithm would wrongly favour smaller block sizes. If you believe that the improved algorithm does not shorten the time to move or copy partitions, please feel free to re-open this bug or a new one indicating your new found information. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 546423 ***