Linux Lunacy in Alaska (Linux Journal)
Ted also did a talk on "More than You Ever Wanted to Know about Filesystems", which balanced an overview of filesystem design with some practical advice for sysadmins who choose and maintain filesystems. Your best way to keep an ext2 or ext3 filesystem defragmented and running its best is not to fill it up all the way, or as Ted put it, "Overprovision like mad." Although it's difficult to come up with a benchmark that fairly measures the performance of a filesystem that has been in service for a while, the Postmark benchmark provides a good simulation of a running mail server, he said."