Pretty basic question I think...

In regards to size, how should I distribute the space that I have available?

Say I had 1TB of space for a GFS.

If I gave root 300GB - how is that distributed out? Evenly? Guess i am confused...

Then I give 400GB to /home? How is that distributed out?

Then I give 300GB to swap..?

I guess I just need someone to shed some light on how the space is distibuted so that all users have enough space along with space for applications and such.

Not really.

Don't split /home from root unless you understand a good reason to do so.
In most cases, there is no reason to worry about how the space is distributed within root (including /home).

Absolutely not. That is wildly too big. For almost all ordinary Linux use 2GB swap is good. If you have specific uses of your system that need more swap, you'll need to describe those in order to get decent advice about it. If you have enough ram and light enough workload that you don't need any swap, allocate 2GB anyway.


What files do you expect to have to use that 1TB of space? Maybe you bought a 1TB drive because the price wasn't very different from a much smaller drive and you have no idea what would ever use that much space. So making root (including /home) one big partition is simplest and most efficient and you can entirely stop worrying about partition size issues until you actually use all that space.

If you have some specific use in mind for most of your 1TB, you might get better advise on partitioning if you describe that use.

If you have a very concentrated use of massive disk space (such as giant video files) it can be best to create a giant data partition for those files. When you reinstall Linux someday for a different distribution or a new major version, keeping the same /home across that reinstall can be very messy (lots of settings files are in /home and won't be compatible) and keeping the same root would be far messier. If you had a giant data partition containing nothing that needs to change on a reinstall and a smaller root partition containing everything that needs to change, the reinstall would be easier.

But if your big files will be scattered all over your /home directory tree or scattered even further than that across the whole directory system, or if you simply don't know yet where they will be, there is little you can do now with partitioning to cut the effort of that future reinstall. Plan to spend some time moving things around before that future reinstall at which time you'll have a better idea of what data you have.

Well I actually have ~8TB of files right now. Most of them are all pretty small files. I am trying to put together a basic structure but for size.. if that makes sense...

That is unusual enough it calls for some explanation. Also, how does it relate to the 1TB you asked about in the first post?

Sorry, at least to me, that doesn't make any sense.

A generic answer to partition size questions for common situations is still speculative to the point of nearly meaningless.

A generic answer for an unexplained uncommon situation is ridiculous.

It is a content management system where thousands of people add documents, view documents and sometimes delete documents - thats why there are so many files in our system. Running RHEL 5.5 for the most part. 5.2 - 5.4 on other clusters.

I figured /(root) should be fairly small, just big enough to run. I know /home would have to be most likely the largest partition.

They are also talking about wanting to do /app and put all applications/programs in there but I dont see the point... but i asked that question on a different post.

My main basis for partition sizing is related to being able to manage and BACKUP my data and system. I wrote a monograph on this thread http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...images-921439/ which details some of my philosophy. Please have a look and feel free to ask any questions in the current thread.

Ken

Ken, can I email you?

I saw your other thread on this topic after I wrote my earlier replies in this thread.

As far as I understand your posts in the other thread, almost all the storage is in /data which obviously ought to be partitioned separately from root.

I don't see anything in that thread nor this one that supports your current idea that /home should be either large or partitioned separately from root. But I also don't know enough about the real use of your system to say /home shouldn't be large or seperate.

What specific things would you need to know to have more of an idea? I figured /home would be large for having many users but I guess if all the data they are accessing is in /data and stored there, then there is no reason to partition /home...?

Is each user of the content management system a unique Linux user (has their own UID, etc.)?

I know of some content management systems in which that is not the case. The content management system has its own user ID mechanism independent of the host Linux system's UID. The tasks of the content management system all run under a single Linux UID, rather than under UID's of the actual users. The /home directories are used only by a few administrators of the system, not by ordinary users.

So do ordinary users of the content management system even have linux /home directories? And if they do, what do they use those directories for?

Yes each user has their own ID.

They use those directories to save documents until they are finished and once finished those documents go into a data-share directory so that way everyone can view them if needed.

I know this is off-topic, but anyways: Seeing the questions you ask here I would highly recommend to ask your boss for some education on the topics you have to handle, may be some courses about Linux would help.
Handling such large systems without the appropriate knowledge will sooner or later lead to situations that you simply aren't able to handle and can cause serious damage to the company.

Well since this is the newbie discussion I am looking for help/suggestions for best practice and advice. I am not making changes to anything, just getting information and helping out to make things easier so really any information that the people in the forum give me is usually valuable at some point even if its not right away... So, thanks for your thought there...

It sounds like you might want to partition out the shared docs dir and keep the /home dirs fairly small, either by partitioning it out, or using quotas.
This assumes that you will be forcing the user's to only keep current (& maybe very recent) edits in their home dir, not everything ie once a doc is committed, they should destroy their private copy, otherwise they'll keep everything they've ever touched (trust me on that!).

You may find this useful
http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_boo...ion/index.html