View Single Post
  #2   (View Single Post)  
Old 16th October 2009
ocicat ocicat is offline
Administrator
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Posts: 3,318
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by Greg_Morgan View Post
I was unhappy to see that I am averaging only 46.67% utilization while using a very lean operating system.
The conflict anyone has in partitioning disk(s) is knowing the needs & allowing enough "extra" space to handle unforeseen situations. No where are situations as unforeseen as when desktop systems are considered.

While higher utilization may be achieved in single-purpose systems (ie. DNS servers), note that if partitions are too small, service may be disrupted -- which many might see as being a more dire consequence than whether the disks involved were under-utilized. This point is only underscored more when disk prices are considered. Relative to everything else, disk space is cheap.
Quote:
I seek your advice to remedy this situation.
jggimi gives excellent advice in this area to newbies -- create one big partition for everything until enough experience is gained to understand how partitioning should be done. Implicitly, this factors in two important points:
  • Don't expect any one partitioning scheme used to be your last. If you learn from your own experience, you will be tweaking partition sizes for a long time as you try new ideas, & your needs change.
  • How you use a system will be different from anyone else's -- so it is difficult, if not impossible for anyone to make recommendations as to what is "perfect". As long as your system isn't crashing, you can't be failing too badly, & even if your system does run out of space, figure out the cause & mark it off as experience.
You may feel that you are past the "one big partition" scenario, & that may be alright.
Quote:
Details of the machine and its intended usage:
Desktop PC with 75GB HDD, 1GB RAM.
...
My partitions (aka slices) are:

/ : 0.5 GB
swap : 2.0 GB
/altroot : 0.5 GB
/var : 2.0 GB
/tmp : 1.0 GB
/usr : 6.0 GB
/app_data: 25.0 GB
/home : 35.0 GB
/freearea: 3.0 GB
This doesn't seem too extravagant, but only you know how the system is currently being used or may be used in the future.
Quote:
I plan to backup /home regularly.
Personally, having a back-up plan is far more important than dwelling on partitioning schemes.
Quote:
Would you recommend that I do things differently?
The only heuristic which seems to endure is that swap should be 2x the amount of installed memory along with throwing in an additional megabyte for debugging structures. Again, this is merely a crude heuristic. People can bicker about whether this is too much or too little space to allocate simply for swap, & they will. Nevertheless, if you were interested in debugging a crash, this would be sufficient space to do so. However, I don't do this on all my systems because of resource constraints. It's a trade-off I accept.

Lastly, you might consider chrooting your repository for both security & separation reasons, but it is not a necessity. Again, it all depends upon your usage & your goals.

Although already said, don't get caught up into numbers too soon. Although Knuth meant this in a different context, "premature optimization is the root of all evil" applies here as well. Don't discount the importance of experience, nor the investment of time required to gain it. Go ahead. Make decisions from your best guess, accept that mistakes will be made, & learn from them.
Reply With Quote