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Re: [OCLUG-Tech] Current thoughts on filesystem partitioning?

On Sun, 7 Aug 2005, Bart Trojanowski wrote:

> In general, I would say... 
> 
>  /      for all your OS, so ~5G

The only thing I'd say here is that corruption on / is much worse than 
corruption anywhere else.  For this reason it can pay to make / as small 
as possible and spit off /usr and /opt.  It can also be a hassle if you 
make it too small :)

There was a time people would mount /usr read-only but that was before 
regular security updates became a standard part of a sysadmin's day.

> /tmp on tmpfs is a cool hack that a friend told me to try.  I have not
> actually tested it yet, so I don't have first hand experience.  Anyway,

There is a hidden catch with using tmpfs.  Linux cannot quota this 
filesystem type yet so a user can (un)intentionally fill /tmp with ease.  
On multi-user systems I refrain from using tmpfs for this reason.  A 
seperate /tmp on a regular filesystem with per user quotas isn't 
necessarily out of the question.

I haven't found the performance gains from using tmpfs to be huge either.
These days users usually have gobs of space in $HOME and don't need to use 
/tmp as a scratch drive as they did when tmpfs was developed on other OSes 
(such as Solaris).  Besides, most systems with tmpfs in use have /tmp 
fairly small so it ends up being useless for a scratch drive anyway :)

> /tmp will eat up RAM as long as it's used actively.  Once files are
> stale it will get swaped out.  This of course means that files don't
> persist over reboots.

The POSIX standard calls for /tmp (but not /var/tmp) to be cleared on 
reboot anyway IIRC and this is certainly standard behaviour for Linux.

Cheers,
	Rob

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