[vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Gabriel G. Rosa (grosa at ucdavis.edu):

> 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.

This line of thought isn't going to fly among system administrators, at
least.  ext2 has always been really valuable as a really fast operating
system, ext3, even used with well selected journal options, is merely
very good.  In situations where performance matters -- and where a
journal is not essential -- the choice matters.

And even on my own servers, which are fundamentally bottlnecked on
outbound bandwidth rather than disk, I'd rather not lose easy
performance gains.

> That is odd indeed ;)
> 
> Can you elaborate a bit on this?

Multiple extra layers of abstraction that don't, IMO, sufficiently repay
that added complexity.  Instead of just dealing in filesystems and their
device names, you have a volume group on top of a partition, and a
logical volume on top of that.  More layers in the middle of your system
to understand and manage (including device-mapper), and more to go wrong.

Yes, you get LVM2 snapshots.  I don't personally find that compelling
enough.  Your Mileage May Differ.<tm>


> I think Bill's point is that swap spindle optimization is become largely
> irrelevant with cheap and abundant RAM.

Again, this is not a compelling argument for sysadmins, or anyone else
who takes pride in getting easy gains of performance where they are
available.

> 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.

You have probably not seen systems thrashing for lack of it.


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

Indeed, one way to eliminate the need for competence at
seek-optimisation is to eliminate seeking.   ;->