[conspire] Partitioning problem

[Tony Godshall]

Hi, Rick.

I'd put whatever you expect to be the heavyest read-load on
(/var/www?) a 2-way or 3-way mirror RAID (to exploit read 
parallelism for best performance).  Perhaps split swap
across all three and trust the kernel to use it intelligently 
(I haven't read kernel VM code enough to be sure that it would).

Tony

According to Rick Moen,
> Here's something to chew over:  How would you partition these drives for
> a Web server / multiuser Internet host?  (And no, I'm not going to use
> LVM/LVM2.)
> 
> o  73GB 68pin SCSI
> o  18GB 68pin SCSI
> o  18GB 68pin SCSI
> 
> Background:  I'm intending to rebuild linuxmafia.com on a VA Linux model
> 2230 2U.  (Thank you, Reg Charney!)  Above are my beefiest SCSI drives.
> The 2U can theoretically house four drives, but I don't want to push its
> cooling -- or make it noisier than necessary.
> 
> Current disk usage (2 x 9GB drives, in 1998 VA Research 500):
> 
> Filesystem     Used  Mounted on
> /dev/sda1        3M  /boot
> /dev/sda5      119M  /
> /dev/sda6      200M  [recovery partition]
> /dev/sda7      123M  [swap]
> /dev/sda8      205M  /var/log
> /dev/sda9      276M  /usr/local
> 
> /dev/sdb1      766M  /home
> /dev/sdb5       <1M  /tmp
> /dev/sdb6      123M  [swap]
> /dev/sdb7     1237M  /var
> /dev/sdb8      729M  /usr
> 
> 
> I'm thinking 73GB as boot drive /dev/sda; others as mirrored 18GB pair
> /dev/mdX housing the important stuff.  Speaking of which...
> Here are subtrees I back up:
> 
> Tree                      Used  Description
> /root                       8M  Root user's homedir
> /etc                        8M  System config
> /usr/lib/cgi-bin            3M  CGI scripts
> /var/lib/mysql             29M  MySQL databases
> /var/spool/exim4          413M  Exim & SA-Exim internal files
> /var/spool/news            27M  Leafnode NNTP news spool
> /var/spool/mail            35M  SMTP mail spool
> /var/lib/mailman/lists     <1M  Mailman list definitions
> /var/lib/mailman/archives 188M  Mailman list archives 
> /usr/local                244M  Locally installed files and records
> /var/www                  438M  Public http, ftp, rsync tree
> /home                     758M  Users' homedirs
> 
> 
> I'm thinking something like this:
> 
> Filesystem    Size     Mounted on
> /dev/sda1     100M     /boot
> /dev/sda5    1000M     /tmp
> /dev/sda6     500M     [swap]
> /dev/sda7    1000M     /var/log
> /dev/sda8    5000M     /var
> /dev/sda9    1000M     /
> /dev/sda10   1000M     [recovery partition]
> /dev/sda11   5000M     /usr
> [rest unallocated, for now]
> 
> /dev/md0     2000M     /var/www
> /dev/md1     1000M     /var/lib
> /dev/md2     2000M     /var/spool
> /dev/md3      500M     [swap]
> /dev/md4      500M     /etc
> /dev/md5     6000M     /home
> /dev/md6     6000M     /usr/local
> 
> One guiding aim is to group trees most likely to need disk seeks
> immediately on either side of the swap partition, trying to minimise
> head movement ("seeking").  Also, I try to divide seeking between
> drives; thus the swap allocation.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> (The "recovery partition" is a duplicate basic OS installation, normally
> unmounted.)
> 
> 
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-- 

Best Regards,

Tony