Most linux distros come with newer journaling system that doesn’t require much, if any defrags. But if your drive is too full (ex: 90%+) and actively used, it will still run into defragmentation problems. There are tools like e4defrag to defrag ext4, xfs_fsr for xfs, etc.

Could you elaborate? (Yes, I realize this is an old post.)

Thanks! I’m genuinely curious.

That means under specified user, 23% of the CPU is being used. Nice is when it’s priority is specified, like lower than others so that it doesn’t hog the CPU. System is a step above the user but ultimately is run by your program. So usually, user + system can be seen as one. User + nice + system is all active CPU usage. Your IOWait of 2.39 means you have some processes that are waiting for IO to respond and can’t proceed otherwise. Steal is a bit complicated to say in a few words but you don’t seem to have any going on and it’s only in VM system. Your idle is 63, which you can interpret as it’s not doing anything 63% of the time.

What is a good IOwait value depends on what you’re running. Like if it was a download server, it’ll still be stable even at like 50%. If it’s a frequent high speed response system, like a database server, even 1% of IOWait can be felt quite severely.

%user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle
23.52 1.34 9.68 2.39 0.00 63.07

Thank you!

Then it’s most likely that you are reaching an IO based bottleneck. I suggest you upgrade your IO throughput either by increasing hardware or optimizing your software.