Partitions

[Jimmie Houchin]

Adriaan de Groot wrote:
> On Thursday 11 December 2003 05:50, Jimmie Houchin wrote:
> 
>>Do I really need a 4gb swap partition/slice?
>>I have 4gb ram.
> 
> 8 is suggested, no? 

Conventionally yes. But strangely enough the label program only did 
4096mb in its original suggestion. So I wasn't sure if it had different 
understanding with large amounts of ram.

> Certainly if you've got a 220G drive, you can afford that? 

If I need to, yes. But I just didn't like the thought of idle space 
which could be used. When I "naively" hoped swap would be used sparingly.

> The story is sort of this: the VM is optimized for the situation that there's 
> twice as much swap as memory. If you never hit swap (I don't, and I've only 
> got 1G RAM, but then again I only do 12-way parallel compiles of C++ code and 
> no physics simulations or model checking) that's not so bad, but if you _do_ 
> end up using lots of swap, this may slow you down. Also, I believe that in 
> case of kernel panics, you can get a complete dump in swap if you want, which 
> would mean that you need at least as much as you have memory.
> 
> So much for the i-think-so and old wives' tales stuff.

Well it looks like I should ere (if it be such) on the side of safety 
and precaution. 8gb it is.

> (original suggestion)
> 
>>/      256mb
>>/swap  4gb
>>/var   256mb
>>/tmp   256mb
>>/usr   228gb  (the rest)
> 
> 
> Tastes vary. First off, /var contains logs that can get pretty big if you're a 
> serveer. For workstation use, this is much less important. If you don't have 
> a seperate /home, it goes in /usr/home. A large /tmp is useful for big 
> compile jobs. Put it on another partition if you're a server. Locally, 
> filling up / isn't as bad. For just /usr, 3G is usually enough _if_ you clean 
> up ports regularly, (or set WRKDIRPREFIX), and have a nice big /usr/local for 
> all the addons. I prefer that setup, since it means I can backup and restore 
> system stuff in /usr separately from addons and ports stuff in /usr/local.
> 
> My personal setup is
> 
> /dev/ad4s1a     989M   451M   459M    50%    /
> devfs           1.0K   1.0K     0B   100%    /dev
> /dev/ad4s1d     989M    33M   877M     4%    /var
> /dev/ad4s1e      19G   2.7G    15G    15%    /usr
> /dev/ad4s1f     5.8G   1.0G   4.3G    19%    /home-local
> /dev/ad4s1g      24G   8.4G    14G    38%    /usr/local
> 
> (see, no separate /tmp and I haven't cleaned it in a while) (/home-local is 
> for when the NFS server is down) (note the usage in /usr) (/usr/local 
> contains builds of Qt 3.[012] and KDE 3.[012]).
> 
> Again, it's a matter of taste and you projected usage. 

Thanks for the information. I'll chew on it awhile.

I have been planning on symlinking /var and /tmp to my /home dir.

I'll do a fresh install this afternoon with an updated partion scheme.

Thanks.

Jimmie Houchin