Re: Pollution and HW trends, was:Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth

[Ric Tibbetts <ric chadera net>]

Marek wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 13 Jan 2002 11:31:00 -0800
> Ric Tibbetts <ric chadera net> wrote:
> 
> > I'm going to refrain from commenting on the "bloat", and the pollution
> > issues, although I agree with them entirely.
> >
> > Want to give your system a boost? do this:
> >
> > Install a string of SCSI drives. Make the lead disk a 4 GB, and you can
> > use either a couple of 4, or 9GBs for the rest.
> > Put the OS "only" on the lead disk. Nothing else!
> > Put the applications on the second disk. Nothing else.
> > Put your home directory, and data on the third disk
> >

<snip>
<that was getting to long to keep hauling around>
> 
> Hi
> 
> Most informative, thank you. Say i have two, 2 Gig disks. Would i be correct in saying that i put all the direcories on one and home on the other ? i am a bit unsure how to sort the directory strucure.
> 
> Marek

Hi Marek;
Welcome to disk setup 101. ;)

First, you'd be far better served to use a pair of 4GB drives, 2's are a
bit small, but useable. :)

When you build the system, partition up the separate disks. As an
example (slightly fudged from my home server):

Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1               124427     72034     45969  62% /
/dev/sda6              1542156   1299964    242192  85% /usr
/dev/sda8               184704    137888     46816  75% /var
/dev/sda7               128480     32876     95604  26% /tmp

/dev/sdb1              2092988   1462836    630152  70% /home

/dev/sdc1              2072508   1354084    718424  66% /opt
/dev/sdc2              1052632    180052    872580  18% /usr/src
/dev/sdc3              1048540     34952   1013588   4% /usr/local


In this case, /dev/sda is my lead disk. It's a 2GB IBM drive.
It contains "just" the system.

Drive /dev/sdb is also a 2GB IBM, and has a single filesystem on it.
/home (do it with a single partition.) In this case, /home is NFS &
Samba mounted out to the other PC's & Linux boxes in the house.

Drive /dev/sdc is a 4GB drive, and holds the application area(s), and
data area(s). Again, just partition it up accordingly. Parts of this
drive are also NFS, and Samba exported.

NOTE: It is also a good idea to put a swap space on EACH of the disks if
you can. It will also help system performance. What can happen there: On
a system busy enough to be needing to do a swap, it is very likely that
the disks are busy as well. If the only swap is on the lead disk, and
it's busy, it will have to wait to do the write. If you have multiple
swaps on multiple disks, it will grab the first one available. Saves
time, improves performance.

Here I have a system with 3 disks, and all three disks contain separate
data types. The disks were cheap (of slightly older vintage
unfortunatley), but configured this way, the system as a whole will far
out perform a system built on a single mega drive.

I hope all of this is helping someone. Marco got me off on a rant. :)
Disk subsystems are the single most mis-configured areas of a modern PC,
and the prime source of system degredation. When coupled with the
current rash of badly bloated software, it's the reason our 2Ghz P4's
only run like a '286.

Footnote:
When I said that the above data is slightly fudged from my home server,
it's because on that server, disks 2 & 3 are actually bound together as
a single volume group, and then broken up as multiple logical volumes &
filesystems, using LVM. A "df" of that box actually looks like this:

Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1               124427     72034     45969  62% /
/dev/sda6              1542156   1299964    242192  85% /usr
/dev/sda8               184704    137888     46816  75% /var
/dev/sda7               128480     32876     95604  26% /tmp
/dev/datavg/home       2092988   1462836    630152  70% /home
/dev/datavg/opt        2072508   1354084    718424  66% /opt
/dev/datavg/src        1052632    180052    872580  18% /usr/src
/dev/datavg/local      1048540     34952   1013588   4% /usr/local
none                     63192         0     63192   0% /dev/shm

However, a full discussion of LVM, and it's use was/is beyond the scope
of this discussion, so I simplified things a little.

-- 
Ric Tibbetts

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