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Re: Opinions on ext3 vs XFS vs reiserfs for LAMP server



On Thu, Aug 23, 2007 at 11:15:56AM -0500, Neil Gunton wrote:
> Great advice, thanks a lot! This is just what I'm after.
> 
> I'd be interested to hear whether other people have wildly different 
> experiences... if not, then I'll probably just go with ext3 for all of it.
> 
> Also, is there any downside (performance-wise) to putting everything on 
> one big partition? It seems to me that every time I try to design a 
> "smart" partitioning scheme, it ends up being a pain in the ass. You end 
> up with empty space in one partition and out of space in another. I 
> could see the point of partitioning on older, single hard drives (taking 
> into account where the partition is on the drive surface), but on a 
> striped RAID setup that is surely kind of moot. The other benefit would 
> be re-installing - if you have all your data on a separate partition 
> then you don't have to move it off and then restore it. So does ext3 do 
> ok on just one big 140 GB partition???

ext3 did just fine on 1.5TB filesystem.  Well unless you had to run
fsck, which took the poor 1.4GHz P3 about 10 hours. :)

I personally tend to use:
raid1 / (10G or so) on a raid1 to store the OS and applications 
raid1 PV for LVM.

I then create all other things (including swap) in LVM.  Makes it easier
to resize later, add more drives, etc.

With LVM you can combine space from multiple drives for use with any
volume you desire.  It really is amazingly flexible.

If you want to later you can shrink one volume, then add space to
another.  Doing that with partitions is a pain since you have to shrink,
move (possibly many things), enlarge to move space from one partition to
another, and you can't easily span disks with partitions.  LVM solves
all that.  With LVM it is even possible to add new drives, and move the
existing data to the new drive while people are using the system.

Having seperate space for /home and /var (keeps log space free and the
users limited from filling everything up) does seem handy.  Just make
LVs in the LVM for each one.  The installer has no problem doing this
stuff.

--
Len Sorensen



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