[ILUG] Manual HD partitioning (Swap Where to place?)

[Brendan Minish]

Frank

If you have more than one disk then make an equal sized swap partition
on each of them. I usually make it right after boot. swap will use
multiple swap partitions in parallel to improve performance, this will
be horrible on a single drive but across multiple drives it probably
helps a bit.  

If you have reasonable amount of ram you should not see swap getting
used very often, if you do then you should try to work out why ;-) 

one thing that Swap is useful for on a workstation or laptop is
hibernate to disk.

I usually use multiple drives combined with raid (where appropriate) and
LVM  

LVM gives great flexibility for things like moving drives around,
resizing later etc.
If you are going to use LVM take the time to learn how to do the extra
steps that may be needed to recover and manage your LVM partitions etc
if 'bad shit happens' or you just want to do something more mundane like
swap out a small hard drive for a bigger one on a running system ;-) 

For LVM's containing stuff that matters I use LVM on top of raid 1 or
raid 10, drives are cheap these days. LVM can also mirror but I have not
used this feature much as it seems to make resizing moving LV's etc more
difficult. 
I also use bacula (tnx OM Paul for telling me about this  ) to back the
machines up since raid of any kind is no substitute for proper backups. 

Given a single drive to play with my layout might look like this 

disk layout, 3 primary partitions, no secondary 
/boot 100M
swap  1G (ram dependant but if you want to suspend here then it needs to
be reasonably big relative to the system memory or it won't fit at
hibernation time)
LVM (remaining space on drive)

the LVM layout might look like this for a desktop

/ 10 to 20 G (a bit smaller if keeping /var separate
/home 10 Gig + (depends) 
/pub 10G (this is where I save downloaded stuff etc 
/var 5G 


if I have other storage needs (media files etc) or need lots of space
for ISO's, Virtual machine images etc then I would add appropriately
sized LVM logical volumes 

it's easy to grow Logical volumes and resize the file-system on line,
shrinking them is an off line operation (boot from rescue disk or go
single user or just unmount the LV if you can ) 

.brendan