Are partitions necessary?

lucmove · 07-13-2007, 06:56 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jpostma

The 'problem' is that it's a big disk. Is it maybe a good idea (for speed) to leave a part of the disk unused (no partitions)?

I beg your pardon? No, you got a wrong idea. Too much disk space cannot impact your system's performance. Actually, there is no such thing as "too much disk space".

BCarey · 07-13-2007, 07:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by gargamel

Note that on a production server partitioning can heavily influence the overall performance, so it's a totally different story there.

Could you elaborate, please?

Brian

justwantin · 07-13-2007, 07:46 PM

Here is my disk usage with a 2 week old install of slack-12. additional lackages installed are mplayer, klear, codeine and maybe 30 mb of encoding things like ffmpeg.

Quote:

rick@rick:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 3.3G 255M 3.1G 8% /
/dev/hda10 7.8G 33M 7.8G 1% /mnt/hda10
/dev/hda6 7.8G 2.9G 5.0G 37% /usr
/dev/hda7 6.0G 3.2G 2.9G 52% /usr/local
/dev/hda8 6.0G 1.9G 4.2G 32% /opt
/dev/hda9 12G 7.8G 4.0G 67% /home
/dev/hdc1 150G 63G 87G 43% /mnt/hdc1
192.168.1.4:/mnt/hda8
68G 24G 45G 35% /var/backups
192.168.1.4:/mnt/hdd1/videos
187G 168G 19G 91% /videos

IMHO you'd be better of partitoning the balance as one partition. It can be used to store things. Also processes like ripping/encoding/burning dvd's need allot of real estate if only on a temporary basis. You might be happy you have that formated partition down the track.

Anyway you won't see anything noticeable in the way of speed by not formatting it.

MS3FGX · 07-13-2007, 08:34 PM

Quote:

Is this a good idea?

/ 48G
/boot 1G
/swap 1G
/home 150G
/usr 100G
/tmp 50G
/opt 50G

That looks very bad, actually.

As already mentioned, / is much larger than necessary (since the bulk of the system files end up in /usr, a /boot partition is not used in most cases, and devoting that much space to /tmp, /opt, and /var is just crazy.

I would go for something like:

/ 10GB
/usr 50GB
/home 335GB
/tmp 4GB
swap 1GB

Z038 · 07-13-2007, 10:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by lucmove

Hardly.

I only have 500 Mb for swap, and never use even half of it. I have 1 Gb of RAM.

My / partition is just 7 Gb. I have a lot of applications and just use 3.9 Gb right now. Most of it is the /usr dir. The /opt dir has nothing but OpenOffice, 321 Mb. I don't see that partition needing more than 7 Gb anytime in the next couple of years.

My /boot dir is inside / too, includes 5 kernels and takes just 20 Mb right now. Why would it ever need 1 Gb?

My /tmp dir is just 340 Mb and is mounted in RAM (/dev/shm). Everything has been running smoothly for one year and a half.

I really think you should bring those numbers way far down, unless you're planning to edit a lot of graphics and video. Leave all the space you can to your /home directory. That's where the bulk is ever going to be.

Everyone's situation is different. I have two gigabytes of ram, and 2 gigabytes of swap space, and normally have most of my ram and swap space in use. I've got a 250GB drive and it is 80% full. How you need to set up your system and how it behaves really depends on what apps you run on your system and how much other data you have.

Right now I have a 250GB drive, with 128M for a GRUB partition, 2048M for swap, then everything else in the remaining partition. I don't care for this arrangement, so I'm going to change it next time I repartition. As others have mentioned, having /home and /usr/local separate from / makes a lot of sense. I plan to reduce my GRUB partition to 32M, leave SWAP at 2048M, allocate about 24GB to / (and /tmp, /var, /etc, /usr and so forth), 16GB to /usr/local, and the remaining bulk of the drive to /home.

lucmove · 07-14-2007, 02:46 AM

I like to keep /var in its own partition. It prevents the system from choking and panicking if something begins to dump erros to its log file like there's no tomorrow and fills up all the space it can find. It is a 400 Mb partition. And I keep my .session-errors file in /var too. That file is trouble.

And many people dedicate a partition to /usr and make it read-only for security, but then I think it's too many partitions for me to manage.

Road_map · 07-14-2007, 04:23 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jpostma

I have bought a 400G harddisk, 2G memory.

Is this a good idea?

/ 48G
/boot 1G
/swap 1G
/home 150G
/usr 100G
/tmp 50G
/opt 50G

To keep your system files, log files, temporary files and data files on different partitions is a good idea. There is only a single problem: space allocation for each partition.

In my opinion, your space allocation is a little bit a space waste.
Here is my / partition for Slackware 12.0

Code:

/dev/hda3              13G  4.3G  8.0G  36% /

Here is my / partition for Slackware 11.0 (+ slackware-12.0-install-dvd.iso)

Code:

/dev/hdb4              14G   11G  2.5G  82% /mnt/slackw

My advice is to think yourself a good and useful partitioning scheme.

gargamel · 07-14-2007, 04:31 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by BCarey

Could you elaborate, please?

Brian

As I am not an expert, I'd like to point you to some more reliable source, first:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Partition/

In particular the following section may be of interest to you: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Partition/...ts.html#number

But I'll try to sum up some essentials. Note, that the following may not be scientifically correct, but I hope it helps a bit to understand what partition is about.

Generally, the read/write heads of a harddisc "fly" over the disc. They need to accelerate, navigate, stop and move back all the time. Because of there mechanics there are areas on the disk that can be reached more easily (faster, with less stop and go) and areas that are a little farther away from the default (or park) position of a disk head.

On a home system you typically won't notice such differences siginificantly. But on a server with many parallel user accesses you can optimize the partitioning by placing the partitions that need to be accessed more often in places that can be reached faster by the read/write heads.

On a production server it depends on what exactly you want to do, what the best partitioning strategy is. You need to identify which partitions are more often read, and those with a lot of write accesses.

Note also, that depending on what kind of server you run the filesystem type you choose may have more or less influence on the overall performance (ie response time, from a user point of view!).

Finally, don't worry about a typical department file system server, which is what Linux is mostly used for. If you don't have a huge database application server or some other special purpose application, and if the number of concurrent users on your system is less then ten or so, there's not that much difference compared to a home system in my experience. You might want to set up a RAID 1 or RAID 5 system, however.

gargamel

gargamel · 07-14-2007, 05:23 AM

Let me add, that to optimize your partitioning scheme to the maximum on a production server you need to know about your hardware. It really can depend on the harddisc or vendor, which partitioning scheme is best for you!

gargamel

BCarey · 07-14-2007, 09:29 AM

Very interesting, gargamel, thanks.

Brian

gargamel · 07-15-2007, 04:57 PM

Just remembered what the SuSE guys say in their manual: "With modern file systems it is safe to run a whole Linux system from just one partition". (Recalled from memory, not a verbatim quote; in case, the quote is wrong, it's probably due to a brain partitioning problem...).

The reasons to have more than one partition have all been mentioned, but on a home system I think three partitions are really good enough: /, /home and swap. I usually have /boot, too, but that's only personal liking.

gargamel

onebuck · 07-15-2007, 05:11 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jpostma

Thanks. Can you add the 'label' e.g. /usr with fdisk or cfdisk to the partition? Or do you this with the setup of Slackware?

Johannes

Hi,

You create the partitions using fdisk or cfdisk. Then you can use the mke2fs to format the partition(s);

Code:

mke2fs -c -j -L /usr /dev/hda3       #this will format a partition
                                     #check blocks, journaled ext3 Label /usr on                
                                     #device /dev/hda3

edit: to correct statement

unSpawn · 07-15-2007, 06:00 PM

Quote:

Just remembered what the SuSE guys say in their manual: "With modern file systems it is safe to run a whole Linux system from just one partition".

If they seriously said that they're prolly tripping on something synthetic. Anyone who has experienced any partition filling up like crazy knows why it's good to have partition scheme that's more than just / and swap.

Nylex · 07-15-2007, 11:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by onebuck

Hi,

You create the partitions using fdisk or cfdisk. Then you can use the mke2fs to format the partition(s);

Code:

mke2fs -c -j -L /usr /dev/hda3       #this will format a partition
                                     #check blocks, journaled ext3 Label /usr on                
                                     #device /dev/hda3

edit: to correct statement

Why bother though? The setup program does it for you!

onebuck · 07-16-2007, 08:56 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nylex

Why bother though? The setup program does it for you!

Hi,

The OP wanted to know how to label the partition and that is a way to do it. My response #27 was an example to do just that.

I also like to pre-make all my partitions and confirm that the partition is indeed valid. You should make certain, especially for swap that there are no bad blocks. The labeling of the volume will aid in security when used properly.

BTW, the setup program does not setup labels. It will allow you to set your mounts for the fstab, I believe that is where your confusion is.