Michael Chaney <[email protected]> wrote: > I used to cut them up functionally so that various parts of the system > were > all limited to a reasonable amount of disk space. Practically > speaking, > that means the root, /tmp, /var, and /home were on their own > partitions. I > would typically put /usr on its own, also, simply because most > installed > software was there and software installation was another functional > area. > I don't much bother anymore because disks are big enough to handle it > and > stuff rarely goes haywire nowadays. > > All that said, I recently had a site that I manage as a friendly favor > go > down. Looking at the machine, the 120GB disk was full. Looking > around, > /home accounted for 95GB of that. Digging in, the web server log - > which > of course wasn't set up to rotate - had grown to 90GB over the last > few > years. It's a pretty busy site. > > Michael > > > On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 6:11 PM, Rob Huffstedtler > <[email protected]>wrote: > > > > > On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 6:22 PM, Curt Lundgren <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > >> I don't know about "less likely" - for me it's more that the > average disk > >> drive has vastly more space than when it made sense to have > "protective" > >> partitions. We remember entire systems that had 300 MB drives, > perhaps > >> less. It was easy to tip the scales at that point. > >> > >> > > There was also the performance argument, back in the day. When HDDs > were > > slow, having /var and /home on different physical drives made some > sense. > > If you're going to put it all on one physical volume, I'm not sure > what we > > thought we were accomplishing. For some of us, I'm sure it was like > why > > granny cut off both ends of the ham before she put it in the oven. > > > > -- > > -- > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups > > "NLUG" group. > > To post to this group, send email to [email protected] > > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > > [email protected] > > For more options, visit this group at > > http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en > > > > --- > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups > > "NLUG" group. > > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, > send an > > email to [email protected]. > > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > > > > > >
Another issue, besides the amount of disk space needed, is the number of inodes needed. Since several different filenames can be linked to the same inode, the number of inodes determines how many distinct sets of file contents you can have. Think of each inode as a separate box, with each box potentially having several labels stuck on it. Thus, if you make lots of little files, it is possible to reach a point where existing files can get larger, yet you can't create any new files. Also, some other operating-system features such as pipes between processes need to allocate inodes on a temporary basis. I can't say for sure about current-day file systems, but on SCO Unix systems back around 1990, all pipes had to be allocated from the root file system. A colleague, who shared both programming and system administration duties with me, wrote a utility program that created hundreds of small temporary files on the root file system, without cleaning them up afterwards. The root file system ran out of inodes, and the server froze so hard I couldn't do a clean shut-down, and had to resort to simply shutting the power off. I then had to boot the server from a floppy, fsck the hard drive, mount the hard drive on a subdirectory of the floppy, delete all of the temporary files, unmount the hard drive, and then reboot off the hard drive. Not fun. -- John F. Eldredge -- [email protected] "Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all." -- Hypatia of Alexandria -- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
