When I first installed my new hard drive with btrfs I was happy with how fast things were running because the hard drive was a SATA3 and the old one was SATA2. But recently two things were bugging the heck out of me – using either Chrome or Firefox was painfully slow. It wasn’t worth browsing the web on my Linux computer. Also, Amarok was running horribly – taking forever to go from song to song.

When I coincidentally came across the btrfs gotchas page I found out that while fragmentation is not a big deal for most users – if you have databases (like Firefox, Chrome, and Amarok use) you should definitely set it to use the autodefrag attribute in fstab. So I did a manual defrag and then set that attribute in fstab. My computer is nice and fast again.