Disk Partitions and Performance Question

From: K7MEM (k7mem_at_myrealbox.com)
Date: 07/21/04 

Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2004 07:24:20 -0700

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?

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.

The system will be running pretty much stand alone. Once the main
program is loaded the bulk of the system activity is over the VME
bus, talking to a group of Mercury processors. 

-- 
Martin E. Meserve
k7mem@myrealbox.com
http://www.k7mem.150m.com

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