Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 10:08:37 -0400 (EDT) From: rdkeys@unity.ncsu.edu To: grog@lemis.com (Greg Lehey) Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Harddrives & Filesystems Message-ID: <199904231408.KAA10359@cc03du.unity.ncsu.edu> In-Reply-To: <19990423104344.H91260@freebie.lemis.com> from "Greg Lehey" at Apr 23, 99 10:43:44 am
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> > Usually 1-2x is sufficient for swap, so use 128mb for swap. > > I'd recommend about 256 MB for swap. In view of the small first disk, > I'd put about 64 MB on the first disk and 192 MB on the second disk. > The ratio of main memory to swap is not so important, but you should > have at least one swap partition slightly larger than main memory so > that you can take crash dumps. Everyone has their pet ideas about this, but I am very curious why folks need so much swap? A couple of my early machines only need mem+64bytes for crash dumps. Some early machines run with no swap, or a swap file or a swap floppy for dumps. I am very interested, for the sake of discussion, just what actually is needed for swap, and what actually is expected to be needed for swap, depending upon machine configuration, load, etc. Any insights are appreciated. > > Use about 64mb for root. > > That's generous, but not too much. I have had a couple of FBSD systems run out of root space when the file systems got larger than a total of around 1 gig. Upping the root size from 32 to 64mb, for example, cured that. Anyone know exactly why that would happen? > > Use about 32mb for var. > > If you *must* use a separate /var file system, calculate the size you > will need. If you don't know how to do that, you don't need /var. OK, for discussion, detail what you expect to have to do to calculate var space. > > Use the rest of the first drive for usr. > > Agreed. > > > Use the second drive for your space, typically home or usr/home. > > I'd recommend /home. > > > If you add a third drive, and add lots of sofware, you might want > > to put it on /usr/local or /usr/src. > > > > With the above scheme, drives are flopping all over on their head > > actuators. > > I'm not sure I understand this statement. Anyway, in this > configuration you'll find that you'll need some symlinks from /usr to > /home, particularly /usr/local. I'd make /var a symlink to /home/var. That was not worded very well... on some machines I have run into situations where speed was important, moving highly active file systems to separate drives tended to reduce head chatter, audibly, and made the machines faster, by levelling out the loading. Although modern drives are huge, these days, so space is not all that critical, I still prefer to have at least 2 drives in any machine to reduce the head chatter and even out loading. It also is good juju to keep my things separated out from the machine things should it crash. Good discussion.... that is how even olden pfartes like me learn..... Bob To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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