A quick and easy performance improvement

[Julian Field]

Alex Neuman van der Hans wrote:
> 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.

a) Make sure you use tmpfs, not a traditional fixed-size ramdisk.
b) It doesn't matter about good hardware or good power. Nothing will be 
lost if it gets killed due to sudden reboots or power-cycling. I made 
sure of that a very long time ago.

  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" :-)

-- 
Julian Field
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