Date: Wed, 15 Aug 2001 07:04:47 -0500 From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: "Cliff Cole" <ccole@innerx.net> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Partitioning Message-ID: <15226.25951.627426.403766@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <63017382@toto.iv>
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Cliff Cole <ccole@innerx.net> types: > Hello, > This is probably a very simple question but I want to basically see > everyone's thoughts about partitioning. I want to know what the best way to > partition a drive and how many drives to use so it will be fast as possible > using as least as possible is I/O. I've read having a second harddrive for > your /var partition because it is being written to is a good idea. Would it > be good to have 2 or more hard drives to make the server faster? I am > wanting to setup a email server and in the past I have had problems with > using to much disk I/O. Any advise is greatly appreciated The rule is actually pretty simple. The more you can separate things, the better. I.e. - put /, /usr, /var, /tmp and swap on different drives, preferably on different controllers on different busses. If you can make them each a multi drive RAID system, that makes it even better. I'm sure at some point the performance either deteriorates or goes flat, but I've not had a lot of experience with RAID. If you're using IDE, you're throwing away most of the benefit of having all those drives, so use SCSI. In the real world, you seldom have that kind of luxury. If you've got four or five drives in a system, it's usually because you need the space, not because you're throwing drives at it to get extra performance. The trick is to figure out what is causing the peaks in disk activity, and split that up so that that disk activity goes to two different drives. Without knowing exactly what software you're using, and under what conditions, it's hard to make exact recommendations. MTA's tend to pound the mail spool, so if you're doing a high-volume mail server, making special arrangements for that makes sense. A separate disk, or two in a RAID - but check with someone who understands RAID about that - will probably help. In extreme cases, people even put the mail spool on a memory disk of some kind, though that makes most people cringe. It's a serious performance boost, but it means that you'll lose all spooled mail if the system crashes or has a power outage, which is generally unacceptable. This doesn't take into account where the mail goes from there, which will make a difference. <mike -- Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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