Partitions

[Adriaan de Groot]

On Thursday 11 December 2003 05:50, Jimmie Houchin wrote:
> Do I really need a 4gb swap partition/slice?
> I have 4gb ram.

8 is suggested, no? Certainly if you've got a 220G drive, you can afford that? 
The story is sort of this: the VM is optimized for the situation that there's 
twice as much swap as memory. If you never hit swap (I don't, and I've only 
got 1G RAM, but then again I only do 12-way parallel compiles of C++ code and 
no physics simulations or model checking) that's not so bad, but if you _do_ 
end up using lots of swap, this may slow you down. Also, I believe that in 
case of kernel panics, you can get a complete dump in swap if you want, which 
would mean that you need at least as much as you have memory.

So much for the i-think-so and old wives' tales stuff.

(original suggestion)
> /      256mb
> /swap  4gb
> /var   256mb
> /tmp   256mb
> /usr   228gb  (the rest)

Tastes vary. First off, /var contains logs that can get pretty big if you're a 
serveer. For workstation use, this is much less important. If you don't have 
a seperate /home, it goes in /usr/home. A large /tmp is useful for big 
compile jobs. Put it on another partition if you're a server. Locally, 
filling up / isn't as bad. For just /usr, 3G is usually enough _if_ you clean 
up ports regularly, (or set WRKDIRPREFIX), and have a nice big /usr/local for 
all the addons. I prefer that setup, since it means I can backup and restore 
system stuff in /usr separately from addons and ports stuff in /usr/local.

My personal setup is

/dev/ad4s1a     989M   451M   459M    50%    /
devfs           1.0K   1.0K     0B   100%    /dev
/dev/ad4s1d     989M    33M   877M     4%    /var
/dev/ad4s1e      19G   2.7G    15G    15%    /usr
/dev/ad4s1f     5.8G   1.0G   4.3G    19%    /home-local
/dev/ad4s1g      24G   8.4G    14G    38%    /usr/local

(see, no separate /tmp and I haven't cleaned it in a while) (/home-local is 
for when the NFS server is down) (note the usage in /usr) (/usr/local 
contains builds of Qt 3.[012] and KDE 3.[012]).

Again, it's a matter of taste and you projected usage. 


-- 
pub  1024D/FEA2A3FE 2002-06-18 Adriaan de Groot <groot at kde.org>
            If the door is ajar, can we fill it with door-jamb?