On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 07:24:20 -0700, K7MEM <k7mem@myrealbox.com> wrote:

>
>First, Force CPU-56, Solaris 8, 512 MBytes memory, 4 GBytes swap.
>
>Initially we were running a 9 GByte disk with partitions for
>"/", "/usr", "/opt", and "/var". Pretty standard so far. When
>we upgraded from Solaris 2.8 we reworked this to put everything
>in a single partition. This made life a little easier with backups
>and replicating the disk. So effectively we split the disk so
>that partition 0 (/) was ~5 GBytes and partition 1 (swap) was
>4 GBytes.
>
>But now we are increasing the size of the disks and going to disks
>that are 50 to 70 GBytes in size. Is there any performance hit if
>I simply use the same setup with the exception that partition 0
>would be the entire disk, minus space for swap? Or is it better
>to expand to 3 partitions with partition 0 at ~5 GBytes, partition 1
>at 4 Gbytes and then partition 3 taking up the rest of the disk?

I'm not aware of any performance advantage to be gained by
partitioning a single disk. You still have a single disk arm.

>Does the position of the swap area on a disk cause any performance
>problems? There shouldn't be a lot of activity in swap, so I'm thinking
>that it won't matter, but I would like some input from other admins.

By placing the swap partition on the faster part of the disk (the
outside edge) you will gain some performance. However I would suggest
that due to the high expected use of swap that you, if possible, move
this to a separate disk dedicated solely to swap. Perhaps the 9GB disk
you're replacing could be used.

Josh