On Mon, 03 Jul 2000, Guillaume Rousse wrote:
> Eugenio Diaz a �crit :
> > BTW, in the Linux philosophy, "/home" does not mean
> > "place to put user's data only", but "place to put
> > data"; that's why we have "http", "ftp", etc.
> > application homes in "/home".
> Just a question about this topic : why are databases data stored in /var
> ?
/var is where files that change frequently are to be stored. I don't
know what databases you're refering to, but taking for example the DNS
files in /var/named (assuming you're running a DNS server), they get
constantly rewritten (at least the ones you're not master for). The
mail spool would be another example. Contrast this with /home/httpd,
which may be updates from time to time, but for the most part those
files are (compared to the contents of /var) relatively static.
Because constantly rewriting files tends to produce fragmentation, it's
a really good idea to keep all the files that get rewritten frequently
in one place, /var, and to give it its own partition. /tmp should also
be either (a) its own partition or (b) a symlink to /var/tmp. This
helps keep fragmentation low on the other partitions. A really dumb
idea is to keep both your relatively static OS files and your frequently
rewritten files in the same place, such as C:\WINDOWS...
