Disk Partition Percentage

[deadpoint]

it depends on what the system will be doing, for a general desktop 
system it's a waste. if you're setting up a multi-user desktop server, 
i.e. linux terminal services you're going to want lots of memory and 
lots of swap.

darin

Cyber Source wrote:
> That being said and this being circa 2005 (almost), It now makes sense 
> why, on an auto partition scenario, the distro (RH, FC) will make the 
> swap partition at the end of the drive and usually on a logical 
> partition rather than a primary. If, now with fast hard drives and lots 
> of memory, the swap partition has become less important (as far as place 
> and size), I could see why they would put it at the end and on a logical 
> vs primary partition. If what is behind the swap is not important, then 
> the swap partition could be deleted and or resized without affecting the 
> partitions before it. If the partition is before 
> other/important/want-to-keep-as-is partitions and you remove one in 
> front of it, then the blocks get reassigned. Jesse found that one out 
> the hard way yesterday ;). And in light of the fact of less importance, 
> whatever, then I would think that the auto partition assignment of twice 
> the RAM for the swap should be changed so you don't end up with swap 
> partitions in 1GB ranges.
>  So, my original question was, is a swap partition in the 1GB range a 
> total waste? In 2005 circa??
> 
> Robert Meyer wrote:
> 
>> Well, I started to answer this once and my laptop shut down.  I guess 
>> you have
>> to pay attention when it says that the battery is almost dead...
>>
>> Anyway, if you want to get technical about it, the reason that swap 
>> space is
>> twice main memory is that in the old days, before fire, the system needed
>> someplace to put crash dumps in the event of a kernel crash.  It would 
>> copy out
>> all of main memory to swap space.  You could then use a crash dump 
>> analyzer to
>> poke through the smoking remains to find out what went wrong.  The 
>> system would
>> only actually use whatever was left after the amount needed for a 
>> crash dump
>> was  mapped out for swap.  This is why we'd make it twice the size of 
>> main
>> memory.
>>
>> We also would normally place swap space between / and /usr file 
>> systems.  This
>> was to minimize the seek time necessary to get to the swapper when a 
>> process
>> needed to be swapped out (remember: before fire and demand paging?).  
>> If the
>> swap was in the middle of the disk, then the average seek necessary to 
>> reach
>> the swap space was about 1/4 of the disk.  The maximum seek was 1/2 of 
>> the disk
>> travel.  I still do things that way (at least try to get swap in the 
>> middle),
>> even though most systems typically have more memory so they don't page 
>> as much.
>> If you put the swap space at the end of the disk, the average seek to 
>> the swap
>> space is 1/2 of the disk and the maximum is the full travel of the 
>> heads.  You
>> can see where this could become a performance issue if you were running a
>> memory poor system.
>>
>> And that's the way it was, circa 1984.
>>
>> Cheers!
>>
>> Bob
>> --- Cyber Source <peter at thecybersource.com> wrote:
>>
>>  
>>
>>> sorry, forgot the rest of the question. I would keep /boot to a 100MB 
>>> and / for the entire drive except for leaving 500MB for a swap 
>>> partition and put at the end of the drive, here is my fdisk -l.
>>>
>>> Disk /dev/sda: 36.7 GB, 36703934464 bytes
>>> 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4462 cylinders
>>> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
>>>
>>>   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
>>> /dev/sda1   *           1          13      104391   83  Linux
>>> /dev/sda2              14        4396    35206447+  83  Linux
>>> /dev/sda3            4397        4461      522112+  82  Linux swap
>>> [root at Office peter]#
>>>
>>> Any thoughts on the swap partition guys? I keep the swap always at 
>>> 500MB. The rule to double the RAM gets crazy when you have 512MB of 
>>> RAM and end up with a 1GB swap, this seems like such a waste. Am I 
>>> wrong in thinking that? Thoughts?......
>>>
>>> Frank Kumro wrote:
>>>
>>>   
>>>
>>>> I am wanting to dump my current disk setup which consists of a swap
>>>> partition and a / partition. What other partitions would I need to
>>>> create? (i want home seperate and what else???). Also what percentages
>>>> should I use for disk space for each partition? I say percentages
>>>> because I have many machines which I would like to add these changes
>>>> too however they all vary in size. Thanks again guys!
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>     
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>        
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>