I'd like to get disk I/O down to a minimum for my new Centos 5.5 installation.
The machine will not be used as a web server anymore, as that's now hosted on a cloud platform. So there are no HTTP requests coming down the line.
If I move the SWAP partition and /var/log/ to a small spare drive, and install Centos on the new larger drive, is there anything else that would cause disk activity on the main drive, when the machine is running but not in use?
fetchmail will be collecting my email hourly, but I'd like the drive to spin down and go into hibernate mode if possible.
I have a backup drive that gets woken up once an hour to backup email, and also during the night to make backups of specified directories every 24 hours.
Apart from that, the drive is not in use, unless I run a backup script manually.
So I'm hoping to do the same for the main drive if that's posible?
Kind Regards,
Keith Roberts
I would suggest looking at articles that focus on laptop power consumption, they typically have a section dedicated to disk accesses and how to spin the disk down as much as possible since this has traditionally been one of the better ways to minimize power consumption on a laptop.
This article has some good tips - especially relating to processes that might be accessing the disk frequently http://www.spencerstirling.com/computergeek/powersaving.html
--Blake
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [CentOS] Minimising disk I/O From: Keith Roberts keith@karsites.net To: CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org Date: Monday, November 29, 2010 9:50:04 AM
I'd like to get disk I/O down to a minimum for my new Centos 5.5 installation.
The machine will not be used as a web server anymore, as that's now hosted on a cloud platform. So there are no HTTP requests coming down the line.
If I move the SWAP partition and /var/log/ to a small spare drive, and install Centos on the new larger drive, is there anything else that would cause disk activity on the main drive, when the machine is running but not in use?
fetchmail will be collecting my email hourly, but I'd like the drive to spin down and go into hibernate mode if possible.
I have a backup drive that gets woken up once an hour to backup email, and also during the night to make backups of specified directories every 24 hours.
Apart from that, the drive is not in use, unless I run a backup script manually.
So I'm hoping to do the same for the main drive if that's posible?
Kind Regards,
Keith Roberts
On Mon, 29 Nov 2010, Blake Hudson wrote:
To: CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org From: Blake Hudson blake@ispn.net Subject: Re: [CentOS] Minimising disk I/O
I would suggest looking at articles that focus on laptop power consumption, they typically have a section dedicated to disk accesses and how to spin the disk down as much as possible since this has traditionally been one of the better ways to minimize power consumption on a laptop.
This article has some good tips - especially relating to processes that might be accessing the disk frequently http://www.spencerstirling.com/computergeek/powersaving.html
--Blake
Hi Blake.
Thanks for that info.
I'll take a look at that.
Kind Regards,
Keith
I've added a second IDE card to my system on the PCI bus, and added a small HDD on the Primary Master port for that IDE card.
This drive shows up using the Gparted live CD as /dev/hde Which sounds about right.
The other drives show up as /dev/hda (Primary Master) and /dev/hdc (Secondary Master). /dev/hdb is an empty removable drive caddy (Primary Slave) and /dev/hdd (Seconday Slave) is the DVD-RW drive.
So I now have a maximum of 8 IDE ports - 4 on the IDE controller built into the motherboard (which BTW are all A-OK), and 4 on the IDE-PCI addon card.
Vivard on the Ultimate Boot CD recognises the /dev/hde drive, as being on the PCI controller.
I was also able to format the 2GB Samsung drive on /dev/hde as linux-swap using Gparted.
The largest spare drive I have is ~7 GB, which might be enough for a linux-swap partition, and a /var/log partition.
The idea is to have any logging and other intensive disk I/O on a spare disk drive, so as not wake up the main hard drive with the Linux root partition on it.
I just want to write any 'disposable data' to a spare hard disk drive, and keep this seperated from stuff on my main root partition/linux installation.
Kind Regards,
Keith Roberts
Hi Keith,
Looks like the Swapping will happen once the PC memory is exhausted 1) So your point of placing SWAP place in another spare disk is a good decision but we still have the Paging happening which cant be avoided :) 2) Again moving the /var/log is another good part but there are some locations under /var/ for eg /var/run which creates PID , so why not moving /var/ to your spare instead of just moving /var/log
Just thoughts
Thanks Philix
On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 12:08 AM, Keith Roberts keith@karsites.net wrote:
I've added a second IDE card to my system on the PCI bus, and added a small HDD on the Primary Master port for that IDE card.
This drive shows up using the Gparted live CD as /dev/hde Which sounds about right.
The other drives show up as /dev/hda (Primary Master) and /dev/hdc (Secondary Master). /dev/hdb is an empty removable drive caddy (Primary Slave) and /dev/hdd (Seconday Slave) is the DVD-RW drive.
So I now have a maximum of 8 IDE ports - 4 on the IDE controller built into the motherboard (which BTW are all A-OK), and 4 on the IDE-PCI addon card.
Vivard on the Ultimate Boot CD recognises the /dev/hde drive, as being on the PCI controller.
I was also able to format the 2GB Samsung drive on /dev/hde as linux-swap using Gparted.
The largest spare drive I have is ~7 GB, which might be enough for a linux-swap partition, and a /var/log partition.
The idea is to have any logging and other intensive disk I/O on a spare disk drive, so as not wake up the main hard drive with the Linux root partition on it.
I just want to write any 'disposable data' to a spare hard disk drive, and keep this seperated from stuff on my main root partition/linux installation.
Kind Regards,
Keith Roberts
-- In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they are not.
This email was sent from my laptop with Centos 5.5 _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
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Blake Hudson -
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Philix T.A