[techtalk] Yet Another Installation Question

[James Sutherland]

On Sat, 19 May 2001, Conor Daly wrote:
> On Sun, May 20, 2001 at 01:04:09AM +1000 or so it is rumoured hereabouts,
> Mary Gardiner thought:
> > On Sat, May 19, 2001 at 09:00:13AM -0400, coldfire wrote:
> > > > I tend to go for spreading both OSs out over both drives.  It's supposed
> > > > to be a performance thing where /usr is on one disk while /home is on
> > > > another and similarly for Windows.  I don't know how much gain I get on a
> > > > home box (probably not much) but I did it anyhow...
> > >
> > > never knew it was a performance gain (not being sarcastic) ... i always
> > > did it out of habit ;P and also for security ... rather than bother with
> > > the quota utils, i just insure i don't have any malicious users who try to
> > > fill up my disk cause me any trouble.
> >
> > It's a performance gain if you regularly need to access /usr and /home.
> > Putting them on separate physical drives means that the drive doesn't
> > have to spin seeking the correct partition.
> >
> > The most common example is moving large files - it's much slower between
> > partitions on the same drive than between different drives.
>
> Interesting something comes to mind there...  What will it cost me to put
> /home on an NFS volume over a 4-box 10Mbit network?  It's gotta be slower
> than local disk but you get to carry your settings across boxes.  Not that
> anyone else in the house uses much more than the "main" computer though.

You shouldn't lose much (if anything); most of the stuff in /home is very
small compared to the software. Depends on what you're doing, of course:
for word-processing, WWW design etc you shouldn't even notice the
difference, but if you're handling big image files...

Might even be a win: you're putting /home on a different disk from
everything else (on the other machines), which will help access times!
(Especially for small files...)


James.
-- 
"Our attitude with TCP/IP is, `Hey, we'll do it, but don't make a big
system, because we can't fix it if it breaks -- nobody can.'"

"TCP/IP is OK if you've got a little informal club, and it doesn't make
any difference if it takes a while to fix it."
		-- Ken Olson, in Digital News, 1988