Subject: Re: Disk partitions (Was: Upgrading from 1.1 to 1.2)
From: Jim Cole (greyleaf@yggdrasill.net)
Date: Wed Mar 08 2000 - 13:19:41 MST
Paul J. Lucas's bits of Wed, 8 Mar 2000 translated to:
>On Wed, 8 Mar 2000, Jim Cole wrote:
>
>> Paul J. Lucas's bits of Tue, 7 Mar 2000 translated to:
>
>> > 1 GB for / seems excessive. What I would recommend and why:
>
>> Excessive? How so?
>
> Uh, excessive as in, after installation, most of / is empty
> space.
No, because the / partition now contains everything on the system other
than what is in /home (based on the recommendation of giving /home its
own partition). It is far from empty. If you do not explicitly create
/usr, /var, etc. partitions, they all become part of the directory
structure hanging off of the / partition.
>> > 256 MB swap
>> >
>> > A simple formula: swap = 2 x memory (I have 127
>> > MB of memory).
>
>> In my opinion this formula is greatly outdated. In a well configured system,
>> there is never a need for more than 128 MB of swap.
>
> Even if you were to have a gig. of memory? Be careful with
> words like "never."
Yes. Even if you were to have a gig of RAM. The amount of RAM and the amount
of swap don't have anything to do with each other. If the sum of the two
exceeds the memory required to run the OS and your apps, then you have
enough. If you need a very large swap partition to reach such a point, then
this is a sign that you really need more RAM.
>
>> If that need ever arises, it is a sure sign that you desperately need more
>> RAM.
>
> Not true. If somebody occasionally runs high-memory tasks,
> then, most of the time, the memory will be wasted. Disk is far
> cheaper than RAM. Even if you don't agree that swap should
> ever be above 128 MB, throwing an extra 128 MB at it on a
> multigigabyte disk will not be missed. (I almost said
> "never.")
Granted. But this is an exceptional case. I have encountered it before, but
didn't feel at the time it was worth pointing out. If based on your needs,
resources, etc. it is necessary to perform tasks for which the system isn't
suited and instead grind away on your hard drives, this is a valid issue. In
this case, maybe another 128 MB of swap will help, maybe it won't. That is
not really something you can say for sure until you encounter such an
exceptional case and analyze your needs.
>> The rest is the part I referred to as a guessing game. If you try to do this
>> type of partitioning and *really* know your needs, that is cool. And what you
>> have looks quite reasonable. However what many people tend to do when trying
>> this approach is to partition themselves into a complete reinstall not too
>> far down the road.
>
> Oh I know. I've learned the hard way. I gave my
> recommendations based on experience so that one person (the
> original poster) could hopefully benefit and not have to end up
> doing a reinstall.
Ya, your numbers looked pretty good, but they are *your* numbers :) What
if someone decided they wanted to adopt the practice of using /opt for a
lot of their packages rather than /usr/local. What if they were in the
habit of storing lots of stuff in /root? They might burn that 256 MB /
partition real quick like. Then one is left moving things to places they
don't normally belong and hiding the fact with symlinks.
>
> My major complaint was putting too much on /. If that
> partition gets trashed somehow, you're in deep. Keeping
> non-root-ish stuff off of it seems prudent.
Non-root-ish stuff *is* off of it. All of that is on /home. And / getting
trashed is not really any different than your /, /usr, or /var getting
trashed, assuming you have good backups ;) It might be a bit faster for
you to do your recovery if only one of the partitions is trashed, but not
much different other than that.
>> If they go a bit too small on any critical partition, sooner or later they
>> will have to reformat the drive to fix the problem.
>
> I know, but my partition sizes still left quite a lot of room
> for growth.
Based on your knowledge of what you want to do with your system ;)
>> Besides, this type of partitioning buys you very little; ... Other than for
>> very flexible backup, as you suggest, and which can be done in other ways,
>> there is much reason to use this type of partitioning. At least not in my
>> experience or opinion :)
>
> Can you say "fsck?" (I find it amusing that it's only one
> letter different from the state you are in when you need to use
> it to repair a disk.)
Agreed. As I said, using numerous partitions was to some degree a hold over
from the days when things weren't so robust. An fsck would be quicker on one
of your smaller partitions. Then again, with a good UPS in place, I think I
have done all of about 3 fsck's (not counting the scheduled ones) in the last
couple years.
Just to be clear, I am not claiming there is anything wrong with your
partitioning scheme. If you really know your needs, such a scheme does
offer some significant advantages in terms of disk maintenance. But for
anyone who is relatively new to this stuff, I think they would be much
better off sticking with a very simple partitioning scheme until they
gain a solid understanding of what *their* needs are.
Jim
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