busy web server: logs on separate disks?

[N.J. Thomas]

Given a webserver under moderately high load (where the httpd log files
grow at the rate of 400MB per day) and two disks, which of the following
is a better option:

    1. put the OS and everything on disk 1, and put the logs on disk2.

    2. put everything on one drive and mirror the disks

With #1, you get max performance since the second disk is pretty much a
write only disk. The downside is that in case the root disk crashes,
your server goes down.

With #2, you get the overhead and performance of two writes instead of
one, but a disk crash doesn't hurt as much -- you just run in degraded
mode until it is replaced.

Thomas

-- 
N.J. Thomas
njt at ayvali.org
Etiamsi occiderit me, in ipso sperabo