From owner-freebsd-arch Fri Dec 7 21:44: 2 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from apollo.backplane.com (apollo.backplane.com [216.240.41.2]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6228E37B405 for ; Fri, 7 Dec 2001 21:43:59 -0800 (PST) Received: (from dillon@localhost) by apollo.backplane.com (8.11.6/8.9.1) id fB85hSt00738; Fri, 7 Dec 2001 21:43:28 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from dillon) Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 21:43:28 -0800 (PST) From: Matthew Dillon Message-Id: <200112080543.fB85hSt00738@apollo.backplane.com> To: Andrew Gallatin Cc: freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Proposed auto-sizing patch to sysinstall (was Re: Using a larger block size on large filesystems) References: <31807.1007732134@axl.seasidesoftware.co.za> <200112072257.fB7MvjE95211@apollo.backplane.com> <200112072311.fB7NB2723789@whizzo.transsys.com> <200112080349.fB83nWU00292@apollo.backplane.com> <15377.41198.83638.460387@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG :Nice. I like it except for the size of /var: : : > /var 128M - lets discuss this. I would actually like to make : > /var larger if the disk itself is huge, because the mail : > boxes and spool is on /var. : :Let's not forget /var/crash. I always make var at least twice as :large as the physical memory in the box, plus some slop, so I have :enough room to hold 2 crashdumps. : :Cheers, : :Drew That's problematic. /var's size requirements tend to be fairly static, unrelated to the amount of memory the machine might have. A machine that doesn't act as a mail spool or repository generally doesn't need a large /var. So if you have a machine with 512M of ram and we create a 1G /var it will almost certainly remain 99% empty for the entire life of the machine. The only time I have ever created a /var larger then 512M is on mail relays and shell machines with thousands of users. So creating a /var based on available physical ram is problematic. If your machine has a lot of memory you will almost certainly be wasting a huge amount of disk space for a /var that will never get more then 1% full (except for the occassional crash dump) It isn't worth it. What I do, personally, is cap /var at 512M and if I have a machine with more memory and I want crash dumps I softlink /var/crash to either /usr/var.crash, or /home/var.crash. Or I run savecore manually to another directory after boot. My recommendation for auto-generating /var is that we not make it larger then 512M. -Matt To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message