LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Glen Turner <glen.turner@aarnet.edu.au>
  To  : Chuckles , linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au
  Date: Tue, 18 Apr 2000 15:03:01 +0930

Re: partitions

[ Do we want "I/O" as a meeting topic?  Say partitions, performance, logical
  volume managers, RAID, backup strategies and finishing with hierarchical
  storage management and storage area arrays? ]


Chuckles wrote:
> 
> Firstly i would like to ask anyone about their recommended partition sizes,
> I have finaly upgraded my p100 with 1.3 GB HD to a p3-550 with 20 GB HD. I'm
> give 5GB to a win partition as their will be other users of the computer who
> want to run win95 (plus there are a few games i still like to play :)). The
> rest will be allocated to Linux with the partitions
> /
> /home
> /usr/local
> /tmp
> 
> does anyone have recommendation for sizes i should allocate to these
> partitions considering i'm using the box as a gateway, programming tool and
> general computing tool (ie web, word proc. etc). Are there any other
> partitions i should consider?
> 
> I was thinking of having tmp quite large and using it as the main file
> repository for all users. Is it possible to assign the /tmp partition to a
> vfat partition so that it is also accessible when i'm in windows?

Aggh.  /tmp should be a filesystem that retains UNIX permissions or you
are going to undermine security.  Using /tmp to transfer files isn't
a good idea anyway: the contents of /tmp are not guarunteed across a
reboot (that is, the init or shutdown script can do "rm -rf /tmp").

If you have a big disk, you want a /boot partition.  It and
the DOS partition will need to be non-extended partitions
entirely below 1023 cylinders.

On big machines, puting /var in its own partition is a good idea,
as with /tmp.  This stops run-away processes from filling /.

If it is a multi-user machine, then put /home into its own
partition or use quotas.

Having a different partition for /usr/local is unusual,
/usr is often given its own partition as it then has
much better odds of coming back without corruption should
the system be uncleanly shut down (as it's unusual to write
to /usr).

It's traditional to put all the major subdirectories
of / into their own partitions.  There is a tradeoff between
convenience and robustness.  Obviously, if you have more
users and a busier machine then the importanace of robustness
grows.

Try and put the swap partition in the middle of the disk.
Ditto with /var (which gets a lot of I/O from log files)
and /tmp.

Having put stuff into its own partitions, you can optimise
them a bit.  The two most worthwhile are to increase the
block size (to say 4KB) and to turn off access time updating.

Finally, once your machine gets above a certain size you
can't go past multiple disks.  For example, a web server
reads from /home/httpd and writes to /var/log/httpd.  So
puting those on seperate disks is a huge performance gain
as the disk head doesn't swing from one side of the disk
to the other and back with each web request.

I'm not sure what the status of the logical volume manager
code is, but LVMs make all this partition fiddling a lot
more straightfoward.

-- 
 Glen Turner                                 Network Engineer
 (08) 8303 3936      Australian Academic and Research Network
 glen.turner@aarnet.edu.au          http://www.aarnet.edu.au/
--
 Earth is a single point of failure

-- 
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