[H-GEN] partition advice

[Robert Brockway]

On Thu, 25 Feb 1999, Martin Pool wrote:

> Of course, the heads _will_ tend to be located over busy partitions, so
> perhaps it's better to locate your busy partitions next to each other...
> and I suppose it's easier to pack them together in the centre.

The setup I suggested does pack them togehter, at the beginning of the
disk, which is the fastestr section, so I believe this is optimal.

> But which partitions will be busiest?  That's not necessarily
> straightforward, because caching plays such a major role in modern
> systems.  Even though the root is the "most important", it's possible
> that the head actually isn't there very much of the time: the
> directories (/, /bin, /etc) are extremely likely to be in cache, as are
> many of the relatively small files found on that partition.  Conversely,
> /var and /home are likely to contain many infrequently-accessed files,
> and so suffer more physical I/O.  

I do believe that / still tends to get accessed alot.  It'd be interesting
to see the cache hit rate for /.
 
> If your machine swaps a lot, then the swapspace should be in the
> high-traffic area.  If (like wistful) the machine rarely uses swap,
> there's not much point giving it premium real-estate anyhow.

This is a good point.  On low memory boxen, I often put it in as the 1st
partition on the disk - something I forgot to mention in previoous posts.
Cheers,
	-Robert
 
--Robert Brockway B.Sc.  Email: robert at blake.humbug.org.au
                                robert at humbug.org.au, r.brockway at uq.net.au
			 WWW:   http://www.humbug.org.au/~robert
			 Founder of HUMBUG (http://www.humbug.org.au)


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