Huge linuxext3 fragmentation invarspoolmail using wuimapd seeking filesystem recommendation

several months, our 4000 users have experienced great performance, but over the last three weeks, performance has degreated to the point of unusability. This morning we built a new filesystem forvar-spool-mail, copied over mailboxes, and performance improved dramatically.

Before the rebuild, our 18GB of mailboxes took 60+ minutes cat todev-null; after building a new ext3 filesystem and copying mailboxes to it, the same cat of all mailboxes on the new filesystem todev-null took 6 minutes.

We discovered that our original ext3var-spool-mail filesystem was heavily fragmented:

# fsck -fdev-sde1 fsck 1.32 (09-Nov-2002) e2fsck 1.32 (09-Nov-2002) Pbutt 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes Pbutt 2: Checking directory structure Pbutt 3: Checking directory connectivity Pbutt 4: Checking reference counts Pbutt 5: Checking group summary informationvar-spool-mail: 4340-16777216 files (92.5% non-contiguous), 5132568 plus 1-33553752 blocks

The general consensus after several google searches is that fragmentation should not be a big problem with ext2-3. Clearly, however, at least for us, fragmentation became a big issue. Defrag tools we found seeem to be pretty old.

Does anyone have a recommendation for either a better way to defrag or for a superior filesystem type that is less susceptible to fragmentation?

Thanks for the buttist, Craig