> On Sun, 2004-11-21 at 11:50 +0800, John Summerfield wrote: > > On Saturday 20 November 2004 17:41, Chris Jones wrote: > > > My question is what are the best partition sizes I should adopt, > > > > If it works, one big partition, swap to a file. > > > > If your hardware is pickly about where it loads the kernel > from, then /boot of > > 100 Mb ((or whatever fc docs say). > > > > Swap to a file, not to a partition. > > I agree about the partitioning. The habit of splitting things into > various partitions came from large multi-user systems where it has > definite advantages. The only reason I could think of for splitting partitions is to preserve user data in the event of a fresh installation. It is convenient to be able to wipe out the / partition and install fresh while leaving partitions like /home alone. That being said, I've never done it myself because running out of space is a worse problem in my opinion. > > About swapping I am not so sure. In the old days a swap partition was > specially formatted and swap I/O avoided the standard disk drivers and > gained quite a bit of efficiency. I do not know if this is still the > case. I notice that automatic partitioning will give you a swap partition that is twice the size of physical memory, more or less. That "twice the amount of RAM" is my rule of thumb; if disk space is at a premium keep swap at least as large as physical memory. Since the system has to be able to move a process's entire working set of memory pages to swap space, too little swap limits the size of a process in memory to less than what it otherwise could be. Erik
