On Tue, 25 Feb 2003 15:24:49 +0000
John Anderson <johnga@btinternet.com> wrote:
> Any way to cut a long story short I have come up with the following, and
> would appreciate thoughts and guidence.
Others have commented on your choices and offered their own ways of doing
things. Here's one more. I'm sure I'm going to get a few RCA dog looks out
of this one.
root@teleute:/# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 904592 893128 11464 0 73992 590080
-/+ buffers/cache: 229056 675536
Swap: 32760 0 32760
root@teleute:/tmp# df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 2949028 1365464 1433760 49% /
/dev/hda5 6910140 2947536 3611588 45% /mnt/hda5
tmpfs 81920 2168 79752 3% /tmp
/ is a moderate partition to encompass anything that that doesn't get
shoved elsewhere. Right now that is /usr, /var, /boot, etc.
/dev/hda5 is mounted to /mnt/hda5 and is the virtual drive. Anything I
think might need a huge amount of space gets its own directory here and then
symlinked into the drive elsewhere. At present it includes /home, /ftp (I got
into the habit of symlinking major services off root), /www when it is
created, and /misc (scratch pad for users when /tmp is too small). The
reasoning behind all this symlinking is that at any time I might drop in a new
drive. I'd just mount it under /mnt, make the directories I need, move the
contents and then switch the symlinks. I don't know where my system might
grow so I'm perfectly fine with having this additional layer of redirection.
It has served me well since one of my early Slackware installs on a 100Mb HD
and has grown through several generations of drives since then.
/tmp is a RAM drive limited to ~80Mb. This should be enough to handle the
day-to-day needs of what this machine runs. I don't do any graphics editing
so it is mostly just the cruft that gets shoved in there on random mutt/vim,
kde, screen, et al sessions. I figure the fact that it goes buh-bye on reboot
is a nice way to clean it out periodically. I must add that tmpfs only uses
RAM when it is actually being used. So in the above example /tmp says it is
80Mb big but it is only taking up the 2Mb that the files on it currently
occupy. 80Mb is the limit and, if needed, I can adjust that with a remount.
That leaves swap. My machine has 900Mb in it. Even at my hardest I
haven't seen it top 300Mb. That's with KDE, Open Office, Mozilla,
Sylpheed-Claws, several rxvts and XChat on an XTerminal and icewm and Pan on a
tightVNC session. I figured any disk space that is dedicated to swap is going
to be largely unused which is just simply wasteful. I have had the drives
quite low; <100Mb on all partitions at one time before a self-induced drive
meltdown. Because of my space constraints I have swapd installed and it will
create as many 32Mb swap files as needed. Yeah, swap files are slower than a
swap partition. Except swap is far slower than RAM anyway and with 900Mb if I
am dipping into swap it is either because Linux wants to dump something out it
isn't using or I have a serious problem going on.
Is any of this appropriate for your install and intended use of the
machine later on down the road? Most likely not. Just throwing it all out
there to show an alternate way of looking at partitions, tmp and swap.
--
Steve C. Lamb | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
| -- Lenny Nero - Strange Days
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