From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Jan 8 21:29: 0 2003 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B53ED37B401 for ; Wed, 8 Jan 2003 21:28:58 -0800 (PST) Received: from emerald.crystal.com.au (emerald.crystal.com.au [203.21.47.1]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1E49C43F43 for ; Wed, 8 Jan 2003 21:28:57 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from shaun@crystal.com.au) Received: from crystal.com.au ([202.165.76.30]) by emerald.crystal.com.au (8.12.0.Beta19/8.12.0.Beta19) with ESMTP id h095WXMl029964; Thu, 9 Jan 2003 13:32:34 +0800 Message-ID: <3E1D0882.7050705@crystal.com.au> Date: Thu, 09 Jan 2003 13:28:34 +0800 From: Shaun Dwyer User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021212 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Mike Meyer Cc: JacobRhoden , freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: web write-up References: <98130130380.20030108095305@telus.net> <3E1CCBDD.9090209@crystal.com.au> <200301091255.39730.jrhoden@unimelb.edu.au> <15900.60172.518135.406735@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <15900.60172.518135.406735@guru.mired.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Mike Meyer wrote: > In <200301091255.39730.jrhoden@unimelb.edu.au>, JacobRhoden typed: > >>On Thursday 09 January 2003 12:09, Shaun Dwyer wrote: >> >>>is they probably didn't make seperate slices for /, /var and /usr. >> >>What difference does it make as to wether these partions are seperate. I >>realise if you have more than one ide drive then having them on seperate >>drives is alot better. On single drive machines I usually make only one >>partion, what reasons are there to slice it? > > > [SWAG follows] > >>From a performance standpoint, putting them on separate slices on the > same disk is probably a loss. It forces the blocks in those file > systems to live spread out across the disk, meaning the time > optimizations are constrained to those blocks, whereas if you put them > all in one file system then the disk scheduler can play with the > entire disk. > > That said *THIS DOESN'T MAKE ANY PRACTICAL DIFFERENCE*. The scheduler > already slices partitions up into cylinder groups and tries to make > files live on specific cylinder groups. Having different file systems > just means lets it pick from a smaller set of cylinder groups. If > your disk is so heavily loaded that this makes a difference, you > really want multiple spindles. > > There are administrative reasons to split them up. For instance, the > backup for /usr is the FreeBSD CDROM set. / and /var I create backups > for, so /usr gets it's own file system, and /var lives on /. On a > second system, / and /usr are mounted read-only - well, they should be > - but /var has the web site on it, which gets updated at regular > intervals. So /var gets it's own file system, and /usr lives on /. > > On my test system, which gets config files stored in perforce, I just > make everything one big file system. > >