[plug] S.U.S.E 10 - Install - Partitioning

[Bernd Felsche]

Andrew Furey <andrew.furey at gmail.com> writes:
>On 2/3/06, Arie Hol <arie99 at ozemail.com.au> wrote:
>> /               455 Mb  /dev/hda2
>> /boot   196 Mb  /dev/hda3
>> /usr    7,000 Mb        /dev/hda5
>> /var            1,000 Mb        /dev/hda6
>> /home   1,500 Mb        /dev/hda7
>> swap    1,000 Mb        /dev/hda8

>I for one would make swap be the first partition, to put it at the
>start of the disk (faster seek access time, I believe).

Faster seek to swap happens only when swap is closest to the busiest
other filesystem(s). I try to keep it between /var and /usr on
single-disk systems; or assign a higher priority swap on an otherwise
idle disk.

The first thing to consider about swap space is contention with
other disk activity. If you're running low on RAM which is the
reason for actually using swap, then your filesystem buffer space is
also quite low so it becomes rapidly more important to keep swap on
another disk.

If you have only the one disk, then keeping it physically closest to
what's likely to be accessed most-heavily will minimise seek
latency. 

You can't do much about rotational latency.

More RAM is cheap if you have the capacity. It may look expensive if
it's ECC, but you have to weigh that up against not only the time
spent waiting for virtual memory access, but also the wear and tear
on the hard disk.

512MB is therefore the minimum RAM I'd recommend for a desktop
system. 'Appliances' can work with much less because the scope for
the memory requirements are more deterministic.
-- 
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