On Fri, 2005-12-23 at 14:32 +0700, Fajar Priyanto wrote:
My own experience shows me just that. My /home partition was almost full with only 2% freespace. During that time, my Kmail became very slow such as when downloading email or when I moved between mail folders. The harddisk was just spinning all the time. Then I copy all my files and mails from the /home partition and move them all to another partition. Then delete them from /home. After that, I copied some of the files and mail back to /home in order to keep 20% of /home free. So far the performance is ok.
It is a good policy to never exceed 80% usage on any partition, precisely for performance reasons. I am not certain how much each filesystem type (Ext2/3, XFS, FAT32) is affected, but 80...85% is a good number to keep in mind. Exceed it, and the performance usually starts to drop dramatically.