Re: Ideal partition sizes.
On Sun, 16 Mar 1997, Paul van Berlo wrote:
> to dedicate this machine to Linux now (1,2gb). What would be the ideal
> partition sizes to split up the hdd for Linux? It'll be used for
I have two machines. I dislike extended/logical partitions. I like
performance tuning. My machines have at least two drives in them. All
that aside, here's the scoop:
Machine 1 (Daily X work, text processing, ftp mirrors):
hda (1.2 WD):
hda1: 300M spare (more on this later)
hda2: 40M /
hda3: 120M swap
hda4: rest /usr (757M, there's no real need for that much)
hdc (1.2 WD) (I'm going out of order for a reason)
hdc1: 500M /local (gets /home, /usr/local, /var/spool/mail, see below)
hdc2: 250M /tmp
hdc3: 120M swap
hdc4: 350M /var (no need for that much, but 100M helps when installing)
hdb (3.1 WD)
hdb1: (all) /server (gets my anon ftp area and *if I add it* news).
Machine 2 (Was going to be a mailing list server):
hda (850M Quantum)
hda1: 200M spare
hda2: 40M /
hda3: 120M swap
hda4: rest /usr (445M, there's no real need for that much)
hdc (850M Quantum)
hdc1: 300M /local (see above)
hdc2: 100M /tmp
hdc3: 120M swap
hdc4: 300M /var (I wanted this big for large email logfiles)
For the most part, this scheme works exceptionally well. My spare
partition holds a complete (and completely separate) linux install (single
partition, just like you had). If I should ever trash my main install, I
can boot into the spareland and run a tape backup of whatever's left -
very handy to have around. My /local preserves important files whenever I
decide to do a complete scrub and reinstall. And with both "spare" and
/local as the first partitions on each disk, it's very easy to resize my
partitions (assuming I'm reinstalling) without destroying my safety net
and/or my personal files.
Both of my swap areas are directly between critical system areas (/ and
/usr, /tmp and /var), making swap an easy trip from any typical program,
logfile access, or tempfile. The biggest performance hit comes when
sendmail is delivering to my mailbox (which is in /local) and is logging
to /var at the other end of the disk, but some recent sendmail tunings
have really helped that.
To summarize, here's a df from each of my systems:
Machine 1:
Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on
/dev/hda2 39039 11965 25058 32% /
/dev/hda4 757151 244581 473460 34% /usr
/dev/hdc4 349343 18561 312739 6% /var
/dev/hdc2 247871 43 235027 0% /tmp
/dev/hdc1 495714 23008 447105 5% /local
/dev/hdb1 2990073 2305554 529894 81% /server
Machine 2:
Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on
/dev/hda2 40007 11272 26669 30% /
/dev/hda4 445949 157541 265376 37% /usr
/dev/hdc4 287850 16326 256656 6% /var
/dev/hdc2 99061 13 93933 0% /tmp
/dev/hdc1 297603 4080 278153 1% /local
Hope this helps,
--Pete
_______________________________________________________________
Peter J. Templin, Jr. Client Services Analyst
Computer & Communication Services tel: (717) 524-1590
Bucknell University templin@bucknell.edu
Reply to: