[CentOS-devel] CentOS 6 Partitioning Help

Thu Sep 1 01:36:38 UTC 2011
Jonathan Vomacka <juvix88 at gmail.com>

Good Evening All,

I have a question regarding CentOS 6 server partitioning. Now I know 
there are a lot of different ways to partition the system and different 
opinions depending on the use of the server. I currently have a quad 
core intel system running 8GB of RAM with 1 TB hard drive (single). In 
the past as a FreeBSD user, I have always made a physical volume of the 
root filesystem (/), SWAP, /tmp, /usr, /var, and /home. In the 
partitioning manager I would always specify 10GB for root, 2GB or so for 
SWAP, 20GB var, 50GB usr, 10GB /tmp, and allocate all remaining space to 
my home directory as my primary data volume (assuming all my 
applications are installed and ran from my home directories). I was 
recently told that this is an old style of partitioning and is not used 
in modern day Linux distributions. So more accurately, here are my 
questions to the list:

1) What is a good partition map/schema for a server OS where it's 
primary purpose is for a LAMP server, DNS (bind), and possibly gameservers

2) CentOS docs recommend using 10GB SWAP for 8GB of RAM. 1X the amount 
of physical memory + 2GB added. (Reference: 
http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/Installation_Guide-en-US/s1-diskpartitioning-x86.html). 
I was told this is ridiculous and will severely slow down the system. Is 
this true? If so, what is a good swap space to use for 8GB of RAM? The 
university of MIT recommends making MULTIPLE 2GB swap spaces equaling 
10GB if this is the case. Please help!

3) Is EXT4 better or worse to use then XFS for what I am planning to use 
the system for?

Thanks in advance for all your help guys

Kind Regards,
Jonathan Vomacka