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From: Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
Message-Id: <199610091940.OAA17882@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
Subject: Re: 961006-SNAP comments
To: henrich@crh.cl.msu.edu (Charles Henrich)
Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 14:40:29 -0500 (CDT)
Cc: danj@netcom.com, freebsd-current@freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <199610091518.LAA06388@crh.cl.msu.edu> from "Charles Henrich" at Oct 9, 96 11:18:19 am
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> In lists.freebsd.current you write:
> 
> >   --- Calculate ---
> > swap = max( ( T - R ), (D * Dp) )
> 
> > swap = min( swap, (D * DpM) )
> 
> > swap = max( max( swap, Sm ), SM)
> 
> Just my two cents, I always run swap a 2.5-3x ram size.  Saved me many a time
> when running netscape and other bloated pig apps.
> 
> > We could do something similar with var partitions (all those logs...).
> 
> You know, I've never understood this.  On my systems I *hate* having multiple
> partitions.  I have / period.  It allows the logs to grow if necessary, tmp to
> grow if neccesary etc.  Now, I understand why you would break /tmp out (as I do
> on systems I dont run, but it doesnt make a whole lot of sense for a single
> user environment), but why /var?  With newsyslog doing clean log rotations, var

1) It's nice to be able to do "df" and see which region of the system is
   eating more capacity than you expected (searching through a whole system
   to find out your /var/cron/log got out of hand is silly, or some wanker
   lpd'd a large binary file a hundred times).

2) It limits the problem to one particular part of the system, potentially
   leaving other areas of the system with sufficient space to run - and
   space for you to use to fix the problem.

3) Some people do like to put filesystems on alternate disks.

> doesnt ever grow unduly large, and in the case when you really want more disk,
> you can expand it up to the size of your disk.  Same argument for /usr, doesnt
> make a whole lot of sense, except for arcane disk problems where you would more
> readily nuke an active partition than one not so active.  In my many years of
> unix computing I've never seen that occur.

Me, I just do it because I like having sameness and uniformity among all
my systems.  My real machines have

/
swap
/usr
/usr/local
/var
/var/spool
/usr/src
/usr/X11R6

all as separate partitions.

Even the most minimal machine has

/
swap
/usr
/var
(and almost always /usr/local too)

around here - and that's only if it is tight on disk.

Call it... "preference".

... JG