Date: Sun, 23 Aug 1998 13:26:00 -0500 (CDT) From: Jeffrey Dunitz <orpheus@lemieux.hockey.net> To: "Robert D. Keys" <bsdbob@seedlab1.cropsci.ncsu.edu> Cc: robert@chalmers.com.au, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Whats a good size for a root partition? Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.3.96.980823131629.1397D-100000@lemieux.hockey.net> In-Reply-To: <199808231600.MAA15841@seedlab1.cropsci.ncsu.edu>
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On Sun, 23 Aug 1998, Robert D. Keys wrote: > > Based on FreeBSD 2.2. > > What are ideal partition sizes for the root, usr and var partitions, > > > > Well, actularly the root partition anyway. There is no X installed > > > > Bob > > I dunno exactly what the gurus think, but in my experiences, I follow > a plan according to the disk sizes. > > For very small drives (under 200M), root=24-32M, var=16M, usr=rest. > > For 1 gig and under, generally, root=32M, var=32M, usr=rest. > > For over 1 gig, root=50M or 64M, var=32M-64M, usr=rest. For disks under, say, 350M, I usually just have a root and swap partition and that's it. That way, if /usr needs to grow a little and / doesn't, I don't waste any space. On a 200M drive, I would never even consider having a separate /var or /usr partition. Even on larger drives, for a machine that's going to be used as a workstation, I put it all under /. For machines that will be doing server-type stuff, where you'd be logging lots of stuff in /var, then you might want to put /usr and /var on a separate disk, or separate partition. I'm just not a big fan of having lots of partitions, because of the potential to waste lots of space. > > Swap is generally mem+1K to 2x(mem). Does anyone know why the religious > tendency to 2x mem? On my IBM AIX systems, swap only needs to be minimally > mem+24bytes. If I have a lot of disk space, swap=32M. > I've run systems with 8 megs of swap and 16 megs of RAM and it worked fine. It really depends on what you're doing. If all you use your machine for is an Xterm to another system, you don't need much swap. If you don't run X, and you just edit files, use IRC, read mail, etc, you don't need much swap, either. If you compile stuff a lot, use Netscape, or do things with large data sets, you need more swap. i've never needed more than 32 megs of RAM and 40 megs of swap on a workstation machine. My home server has the same arrangement. For a departmental server or something, where people are actually running lots of stuff on the machine rather than just having it serve files, you will want to make sure you have more swap. That's when you may want to go with the 1.5 or 2 * MB_MEM formula, which is probably safe. If you have that much swap, and you're actaully using all of it, it's probably an indication that you need to get more actual RAM. Partitioning and swap-sizing is really kind of black-magic, fly-by-the-seat-of your-pants kind of stuff, no matter what anyone tells you. The 1.5 or 2 * MB_MEM rule is really just a convenient guideline for people who can't or don't want to experiment, and aren't already short on disk space. > > RDK > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message > =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Jeffrey Dunitz | Current Job: | orpheus@avalon.net BOFH Emeritus, Avalon Networks | Information Services | Iowa City, IA http://www.avalon.net/~orpheus | Cray Research/SGI | (319) 339-8268 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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