[vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice

[Gabriel G. Rosa]

On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 11:27:06AM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
> Consider /usr on a server where that is kept mounted read-only except
> during installation/removal of packages.  Why have the overhead of a 
> journal?
> 
> Consider also a /tmp filesystem where you want high performance, and for
> some reason don't want to use tmpfs.  (Maybe you prefer /tmp to be
> persistent between reboots.)  Again, why do you want the overhead of a
> journal on _/tmp_?
> 

I find the argument of journal overhead to be about as relevant in a
modern machine as the argument of software RAID overhead. That is to say,
not at all.

> > * The lack of online resizing and logical volumes
> 
> Oddly, some of us don't like LVM/LVM2 on account of the avoidable
> complexity those add to a system's architecture, and would rather not
> trust our files to online resizing.
> 

That is odd indeed ;)

Can you elaborate a bit on this?

> > * Multiple swap partitions because of limitations on swap size partitions.
> 
> Multiple swap partitions per _spindle_, as mentioned in part of
> Karsten's page, is indeed old hat.  On the other hand, having multiple
> swap partitions of the one-per-spindle variety is just common sense, as
> it improves performance considerably.
> 

I think Bill's point is that swap spindle optimization is become largely
irrelevant with cheap and abundant RAM. You can argue it's not a lot
of extra work to set up, but it's also not a lot of gains to be had
over time.

> Anyhow, I'd feel a prize chump if I had my server set up as
> single-filesystem plus swap on quite a few grounds, including
> performance:  Being able to put the swap in the middle of the spindle,
> and the most-visited portions of the file tree on either side, is a huge
> win for keeping average seek time low.  I'd be bloody incompetent if I
> _didn't_ do that.


Until your storage is all solid state and seek times become
meaningless. Some of us (although not me yet) are already there.

-G