A quick and easy performance improvement

[Alex Neuman van der Hans]

Julian Field wrote:
> I think that splitting / and /var slowed your system down. You have 
> just cancelled that out.
>
> Thoughts?
There are many ways of doing things. I used to let the OS decide how to 
partition for me before I developed my own way of doing things. I've 
seen people who swear by splitting their filesystems across partitions, 
disks, arrays, machines, sectors, quadrants, galaxies. They say it's 
better for performance/security/convenience/whatever.

Call me obtuse. I just set up a large / and call it a day. I may set up 
a ramdisk for /var/spool/MailScanner/incoming if I know it's good 
hardware and the power's good. I may even create a small (100-200mb) 
/boot and store a few little tools in there. Performance? The 
performance gains I could get from partitioning are marginal. The 
performance losses if not managed correctly can be nasty, as has been 
mentioned. Security? It shouldn't *matter* how I partition my 
filesystem. Convenience? You can clone a drive onto a bigger one if you 
need the space.

When I read the message, I thought... this is good for all those 
sysadmins out there who are accustomed to splitting their filesystems 
for performance/security/convenience reasons. The BOFH in me read the 
message as ... "If I drop this really big rock I find my running speed 
increases, thought I'd share it with you". I didn't reply to the message 
because I didn't want to sound rude, though.

Then came Julian and, in a completely deadpan, straight-to-the-point, 
vulcan-like manner said "but dude, you're carrying a big rock" :-)