Defragmenting the registry

Question

Hi All,

Does any body know how to defragment windows registry.

We googled and found several free tools doing the same.But no tool is having open source. One tool is there - 'UltraDefrag' which is open source tool written in 'C' for file defragmentation.

Please provide help in searching open source/ sample code to defragment windows registry...or any windows API functions or libraries for doing the same.

Regards.

Answer 1

The way this works is by executing code during the Windows boot process. Registry hive files cannot be defragged like other files, and nor can the pagefile. But they can be treated as ordinary files before Windows has finished booting, when they are not yet in use by the system. It is at this stage that a kernel mode driver-like component can defragment them.

I've seen tools that did this, but they seemed to treat it as an exciting technical challenge (well, about fifteen years ago it was), rather than as something that might be useful - how fragmented do registry hive files become? Probably not that fragmented. Depends how often they have to grow in size.