[vox-tech] size of /var

[Ken Bloom]

On Tuesday 09 January 2007 00:00, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> For those of you with Debian based systems with /var on its own
> partition, how much space did you allocate for /var?
>
> On my system, I'm starting to feel cramped:
>
>
>    Filesystem   Size  Used  Avail Use%  Mounted on
>    /dev/hdb2    581M  416M  135M  76%   /var
>
>
> I would've sworn that 581MB was big enough, but apparently not.  The
> largest directories in /var (everything else is small change):
>
>    satan# du -hs *
>    49M     cache
>    209M    lib
>
>
> In cache (everything else is small):
>
> 18M     auto-apt
> 15M     apt
> 9.6M    debconf
> 4.8M    locate
> 1.5M    man
> 539K    fontconfig
> 371K    apt-listbugs
>
> And in lib (everything else is small):
>
> 46M     dpkg
> 45M     apt
> 39M     texmf
> 24M     mysql
> 20M     gconf
> 13M     cyrus
>
> It's weird that the directory contents add up to what they do.  Guess
> that's the power of a preponderance of small numbers...

The proper size for /var depends what you put there. Debian keeps it's 
apt stuff there, including downloaded .debs (until you apt-get clean). 
But your mysql (and postgres) databases live there, and your leafnode 
newsfeeds live there, your webserver's root lives there by default. On 
my AMD64 laptop, my x86 chroot lives there (for lack of a better place) 
and probably a whole bunch of other things that I don't even do with my 
computer have the potential to suck up space on /var.

I think /var on my laptop is like 20 gigs or something, to deal with the 
load I stick on it. I'm just now thinking about how to reorganize the 
partitions on my desktop to give /var its own partition, especially 
since I have so much extra space in /home that I can shrink.

BTW, my x86 chroot became less important last week since I discovered 
that OpenOffice.org is now available in sid and etch for AMD64. Just a 
heads up to all of you AMD64 users out there.

--Ken

-- 
Ken Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/
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