[PLUG] Partitioning advice for development Linux database server

Steve Jorgensen jorgens at coho.net
Fri May 10 19:37:00 UTC 2002


On Friday, May 10, 2002 8:35 AM, Wil Cooley [SMTP:wcooley at nakedape.cc] 
wrote:
> Also Sprach Steve Jorgensen <jorgens at coho.net> on Fri, May 10, 2002 at 
03:53:52AM PDT
> > Hi all,
> >
...
> >
> > The box in question has
> > 	one 9GB, 10,000 RPM, 8.2 ms avg. seek, fast/wide SCSI-2 drive (and
> > fast/wide SCSI controller)
> > 	and one 1.75GB, 5400 RPM, 10ms avg. seek IDE drive.
> >
> > Specific questions:
> > 1. In what path do most database server packages normally put data 
files by
> > default?  Obviously, I'll want that to be fairly big and choose the
> > partition's filesystem carefully.
>
> /var.  Here's the layout from a db server I just built that has a
> pair of 4G disks, configured as RAID1 with Red Hat 7.2:
>
> $ df -h
> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/md2              288M  154M  119M  57% /
> /dev/md4               23M   13M  9.3M  57% /boot
> /dev/md3              190M   20M  160M  11% /home
> /dev/md1              1.4G  457M  943M  33% /usr
> /dev/md0              1.8G  106M  1.6G   6% /var

Cool - thanks.

...

> > 2. What are some other considerations on what and how many partitions
> > to use on this box and what filesystems to use on each?  I'm leaning
> > toward a journaling filesystem, and I guess EXT3 is an obvious choice,
> > but is it considered well tested and trustworthy yet?
>
> Pretty much so.

Great - ext3, it is.

> > 3. Are there any other questions I might be forgetting to ask before
> > I install Linux on this box?
>
> You might ask yourself why the hell you're putting an IDE drive
> into it...

Because it's good to have more than one physical drive, and that's a drive 
I have.  If this were a production server, I would have a budget to set up 
a SCSI RAID system that would have no use for IDE, but I have no budget now 
for this at-home study system.  Valid reasoning?

I was planning to use the IDE drive primarily as archival storage space 
(compressed image of a recent stable system state before I mess it up doing 
something stupid), and possibly for the swap partition as well, since that 
would reduce thrashing on the other drive if swapping occurs.

Thanks very much for your help, Wil!

--
Steve Jorgensen
Database application developer - available
http://www.coho.net/~jorgens





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