Re: Disk partitioning - recommended sizes
On Thu, 9 Jan 1997, Ronald van Loon wrote:
> This leaves about 2.0 Gb for the /, /usr, /var/spool and swap partitions. I
> have another 2.0 Gb disk and I am contemplating to put the swap partition on
> there (for load balancing).
>
> I estimate a need for about 250 Mb spool.
Partitioning is kind of fun. Maybe it's just me, but I can almost
imagine a cut scene in Batman III where Jim Carrey says, "Riddle me this,
Batman! If I've got a two gig hard drive, how large should /usr be?"
You might want something like the following:
50MB /
100MB /var
250MB /var/spool
250MB /tmp
500MB /usr
750MB /usr/local
100MB swap
You can then mount / and /usr as read-only. I assume you meant /home by
"user data". I've never seen any performance gain by putting my swap
partition anywhere, actually. I've put it in a variety of places, but
lots of people swear you'll get a 0.1% perfomance gain by putting one
swap partition on the last partition of the first hard drive on the
second controller and putting another swap partition on the first
partition of the second hard drive on the first controller, unles you
have /usr on the first partition of the first hard drive on the first
controller, whereas you should then put a swap partition on.... and so on.
If you find yourself that worked up over swap partitions, I'd just like to
say that counseling really does help.
Oh, and 250MB is rather small for /var/spool, but if you're not getting
alt.binaries.* or alt.sex.*, then it might work. For a day or two...
Shrinking /usr/local and increasing /var/spool might be a good idea. Oh,
I wouldn't make /usr any less than 300MB unless you're a masochist. I
remember when 200MB worked fine for a full slackware installation, but
those days are long gone. The kernel source itself takes up almost 40MB
now. Add emacs, X, and some libraries... nasty.
I like having /tmp large enough to ftp and/or compile several large
packages. I like using /tmp as a testbed for stuff before I let it trash
my /usr partition.
Just in case anyone doesn't know, you can remount a filesystem as
read-only by "mount -o remount,ro /usr" (assuming /usr is in your fstab).
That way, you increase your security and stability. Then, when you need
to write to /usr, mount it writeable with "mount -o remount,rw /usr".
However, some programs insist on writing to /usr, when they should really
be using /var (var, for variable, meaning frequently changing). Stuff on
/usr shouldn't really ever change.
Nethack, for instance, wants to install to /usr/lib/games, but it creates
a lock file in the current directory. So, I moved nethack over to
/var/games and it never noticed. Just make sure you're not using silly
programs that have configuration options compiled in.
I guess I should mention that I've run Slackware for years, but I'm a
relative newbie at Debian, so someone else might have better suggestions
for partitioning.
Sorry the message is so big... my web pages are too long, too.
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