Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Colocation and Data Centers : Optimum Partion setup

[dgessler]

I just purchased a dell poweredge in order to move my website to its own dedicated server. I have a few questions on the best linux partition setup for a webserver. The system has 8 gigs of ram, raid 10 setup with four 15k rpm drives and two quadcore cpu's.

The os is CentOS 5.1

The server can have up to 30,000 uniques in a single day and can be somewhat database intensive.

Does anyone have a recommend partition setup, besides the default?

With 8 gigs of ram, what is the recommend swap? I've seen rules that say anything over 2 gigs of ram, the rule is S = M+2. So that would put me at 10 gigs swap. Is that overkill?

Should i make a seperate partition for log files? Any advice would be appreciated...

[devonblzx]

I doubt you need 10GB of swap, swap should only be used as a backup when your system runs out of RAM. We usually partition about 4GB for swap per 8GB RAM, however we rarely use over a few mb. If you use too much swap, it will end up slowing your site down greatly as hard drive space is ~100X slower than RAM.

[bqinternet]

I still follow the old general rule of Swap = 2 * RAM. For 8GB, that would be a 16GB swap partition.

[gate2vn]

I see the rule, but swap is always much slower than RAM. Why not have too much swap meanwhile RAM is not very expensive currently?

[KDAWebServices]

2GB swap is the max we ever put on a server - if it's using 2GB swap, it's going to have ground to a halt anyway and most likely locked itself up, so any extra isn't going to do you any good at all.

For a general server, we always have:
/
/boot
/home
/tmp
/usr
/var
swap

That's if it's just a single RAID set. If we've got multiple sets on different drives, then it's most likely for DB work, so we'll split /var/lib/mysql off on to its own RAID set (if it's for mySQL).