Partition Size

[Peter N. M. Hansteen]

Danny <nocmonkey at gmail.com> writes:

> On Mon, 24 Jan 2005 21:03:17 -0500, Peterhin <hindrich at worldchat.com> wrote:
> > I am going by what G. Lehey is suggesting in his book "The Complete
> > FreeBSD" on pg. 70 he does not recommend a /usr, or a /var file system.
> [...]
> 
> What does he recommend then?

Now that I have the chance to make you go and buy the book, maybe I
should <grin type="evil"/>

Actually Greg Lehey offers a well reasoned discussion of the pros and
cons of various partitionings, arguing among other things that given the
typical sizes of modern hard disks, partitions of even a few percent of
a normal disk size is quite roomy compared to the requirements of a
complete FreeBSD binaries+source+ports+your choice of packages
installation. 

Consider also that in a home or personal system such as a laptop, your
logs or other /var material isn't likely to grow unmanageably, and when
it comes to swap, you need some, but swap much larger than system memory
is not useful for crash dumps and if you swap that much, there are other
problems. For a home or personal system, you really only need /, swap
and /home.

So with this advice in mind, consider my reasonably modern laptop, which
came with a gigabyte of RAM and a hard disk advertised as 80GB but
actually per dmesg

ad0: 76319MB <FUJITSU MHT2080AT/0022> [155061/16/63] at ata0-master UDMA33

After gazing into thin air until my wife positively started blushing, I
ended up partitioning like this:

/dev/ads1a      /       12GB
/dev/ads1b      swap     2GB
/dev/ads1d      /home   "the rest" - 59GB according to df -h.

12GB for / is vastly more than you're likely to need.  With base system,
full 5.3 source and ports tree and my 452 most needed packages
installed, my / has 6.6GB used (that is 62%).

Again, this is for a home or personal system. If you are setting up a
large server of some kind or other which will be running a lot of
processes, the equations will turn out differently, and things like
separate /tmp and /var partitions (or even disks) may start to make
sense. 

The only real guide is experience from your typical use, or for that
matter, from people who run rougly the same things you do. If you need a
different configuration for what you want to do, symptoms will show up
soon enough.

-- 
Peter N. M. Hansteen, member of the first RFC 1149 implementation team
http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/ http://www.datadok.no/ http://www.nuug.no/
"First, we kill all the spammers" The Usenet Bard, "Twice-forwarded tales"