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

[Richard Meyer]

On Fri, 2006-02-03 at 11:15 +0800, Bernd Felsche wrote:
> 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. 

Us old farts would be able to tell you that the correct place for swap
is in the middle of the the most heavily used partition of the least
used disk. Since we aren't going to put it in the middle of a partition
(not Windows or OS/2 users), put it right next to the most heavily used
partition on the least used disk.

Even better than that is not to page at all ;-)
> 
> 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.

Agreed - you can get by with less - my lappy has 128MB, but the distro
I've got on there has been pared down as much as possible, and I''m
prepared to live with bad responses.
-- 
Richard Meyer <meyerri at westnet.com.au>