Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!decwrl!ucbvax!PAN.SSEC.HONEYWELL.COM!thompson From: thompson@PAN.SSEC.HONEYWELL.COM (John Thompson) Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo Subject: re: Disk partitioning Message-ID: <9008201800.AA05131@pan.ssec.honeywell.com> Date: 20 Aug 90 18:00:45 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 53 > <> > > The first thing I notice when I started work here is that none > of the disks here are partitioned, ie only a > > / > > rather than > > /, /usr, /usr/local, and so on..... > > and so on. I have been given the impression that the formal [sic] is > the norm as far as apollo is concerned. Am I right? I believe so. I have certainly received no suggestions that I should partition my disk into volumes. > Is there a reason NOT to do so? Not partitioning your disks is (1) easier, and (2) lets you be sloppy (laid-back?) in administration. I don't need to analyze the cpu usage to try and find out how large my boot partition must be; I don't need to verify that the user-directories won't grow too large; .... The long and short of it is that I can take the unused disk space and make it available to whatever needs it _at_ _the_ _current_ _moment_. We have a DN10020 that runs _MANY_ memory-hogging jobs simultaneously. (It doesn't actually need all the memory, but it allocates it 'just in case'). This translates into disk usage for swap space. Right now, it's using about 400MB of disk for virtual memory swapping! Worst case I've seen is well over 1/2 a GB! However, there are many times when we don't have that much swap-space in use (for reasonably long periods). During this time, that extra disk space can be used for local user storage, for temporary scratch space, or anything else. If the usage changes later on, I won't need to re-partition the disk, either. Also, it's more efficient (in my opinion) to have a single large disk-space than several small ones. Would you rather have 50MB free in one spot or in 5 chunks of 10MB each? > For all system administrators out there, > how many of you actually partition your disk and what is/are > your main reason(s) for partitioning your disk. We used to partition our 500MB FSDs at sr9.x. We did this because the SALVOL was/is very slow at sr9, and we didn't want a system crash to keep the node down for an extended period. At sr10, with it's faster SALVOL, we have gone to a single partition for each disk (and in fact, stripe some disks to gain the extra 'big disks'.) John Thompson (jt) Honeywell, SSEC Plymouth, MN 55441 thompson@pan.ssec.honeywell.com As ever, my opinions do not necessarily agree with Honeywell's or reality's. (Honeywell's do not necessarily agree with mine or reality's, either)