Re: Which partitioning scheme gives best performance?

From: Bill Unruh (unruh_at_string.physics.ubc.ca)
Date: 06/22/04

  • Next message: Floyd L. Davidson: "Re: Which partitioning scheme gives best performance?" 
    Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 22:41:12 +0000 (UTC)

    Chris Carlen <crcarle@BOGUS.sandia.gov> writes:

    ]Hi:

    ]I wish to optimize performance of a desktop machine with a single hard
    ]drive. I will be using Suse 9.1, which by default uses ReiserFS which I
    ]don't trust since I have heard of some filesystem corruption issues.
    ]Thus, I will be using ext3 for most partitions except for /tmp, as seen
    ]below.

    ]Here is my plan, followed by some of the reasoning:

    ]I have a 74GB Western Digital Raptor 10kRPM SATA drive on a machine with
    ]1GB RAM. The partitions will be as follows:

    ]/dev/hda1 swap 1GB
    ]/dev/hda2 / ext3 36GB
    ]/dev/hda3 /home ext3 20GB
    ]/dev/hda5 /vmware ext3 5GB
    ]/dev/hda6 /tmp reiser 2GB
    ]/dev/hda7 extra

    ]The main idea here is the splitting up of / and /home. In the past I
    ]have just used one partition for / and that's that. Saves me the
    ]trouble of anticipating how much space to use for each subdir. I don't
    ]want to use LVM.

    ]The question is then: does putting stuff like vmware on it's own
    ]partition, as well as separating / and /home on the disk, increase
    ]performance or decrease it? It may lead to worse performance, if the
    ]system must switch back and forth between / and /home for instance, when
    ]loading a large application that requires several stages of access to
    ]the user's home dir while the app is loading.

    ]On the other hand, if there is any sort of fragmentation issue with
    ]Linux ext2/3 filesystems then the multi-partition arrangement might give
    ]better performance. I am not sure about this, though most folks seem to
    ]indicate it doesn't have fragmentation. I can't imagine why not though,
    ]so I'd be interested in technical explanations about this.

    ]All partitions except /tmp are ext3 because I trust it, even though I
    ]have heard ReiserFS is faster for small files. Since I can't be sure I
    ]will have mostly "small" files, and some of my most performance
    ]intensive operations may involve large files, ext3 seems like a
    ]blameless choice.

    ]Thus, since /tmp is of lower concern if something goes wrong with the
    ]data integrity, I made it ReiserFS if that might moderately improve
    ]performance.

    ]Another option, as I indicated above, would be to stick with the way I
    ]usually do things, which is the lazy way of just one partition with / .

    ]I am interested in other users' comments about how partitioning
    ]arrangements affect performance, and comments on my plan.

    I suspect not much.
    HOwever, making separate partitions-- for / and /usr
    is a very good idea for upgrading. YOu want system stuff on one partition
    and other stuff (self installed or user files) on another. Otherwise
    installing the next time is a real real pain.
    I have / (1GB,) /usr (5GB) and then /home or /local (containing /home) or
    even /usr/local taking up the rest.
    (of course a swap partition as well, but that is max 1G)

  • Next message: Floyd L. Davidson: "Re: Which partitioning scheme gives best performance?"

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