[vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bob Scofield (scofield at omsoft.com):

> How important is it to have a separate partition for /tmp?  I've
> got 2G on the desktop I'm using right now.  The partition for / is
> 15G.  I vaguely recall a discussion here years ago and people
> saying that /tmp is on a separate partition to prevent / from being
> crowded.  

Eh, 'crowded' as in hitting 100% capacity?  There is some small logic to
that.

But you haven't considered a vital distinction.  SSD or hard disk?  Some
new laptops have one, some the other.  The wear characteristics of SSD
have improved greatly since early days, but in general you still want to
do what you can to avoid excess wear.  A /tmp filesystem is by nature
pretty write-intensive.

One can make an argument that a host with only SSD storage should have
no swap filesystem.  Then, if it runs out of free RAQ, the kernel OOM
(out of memory) process killer will just terminate things as necessary,
rather than swapping them out.

> Does it make sense to have a 2G /tmp? 

Consider:  If you're considering a laptop with a 2TB hard drive, why
_not_ have a 2GZB /tmp filesystem?

SSDs are really a radically different (and almost entirely better)
proposition, and ideally you should consider carefully how to proceed
with them.  See for example https://wiki.debian.org/SSDOptimization  .

On a system with a single hard drive, I pay close attention to
filesystem _ordering_ to minimise average seek distance, which means
grouping the most-accessed filesystems on either side of the swap
filesystem, and the less-accessed filesystems further out from the
middle.  If the system has mulitple hard drives (that aren't in a RAID
set), then additional optimisations are possible.  And some attention to
filesystem mount options is useful for several reasons.