On Jan 3, 2011, at 2:39 PM, Dave <tdbtdb+centos at gmail.com> wrote: > On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 10:06 PM, Gordon Messmer <yinyang at eburg.com> wrote: >> On 01/01/2011 05:56 PM, Dave wrote: >>> >>> Is there a best practice? People have to be doing something! >> >> I think that's unlikely. If you don't "oversubscribe" your disk space >> as a matter of policy, you'll force upgrades earlier than most people >> would consider them necessary. Most users, I'd expect, will be well >> under quota most of the time. You'd commit all of your disk space to >> quota long before the space was actually used. In your scenario, you'd >> be required to expand the disk array whenever it was committed to quota, >> even if actual use was very low. Every site that I know of which uses >> quotas handles disk upgrades when utilization requires it, not when >> quota subscription does. > > So, is it fair to rephrase that as "ignore quotas, pay attention to > actual usage"? > > I agree that some degree of oversubscription is probably desireable, > and it would be much easier to just add storage whenever it looks to > be getting fullish. My situation right now makes that difficult - > budget is gone, so I can't add storage, and my users sometimes start > up a big simulation that could potentially fill the disk right before > the weekend. If the hoggy simulation crashes itself, that's okay, but > if it brings down a lot of other jobs submitted by other users, I look > bad. I guess even if there was some good tool support, this task is > doomed to make everyone unhappy. Maybe you can have the users run these in containers like OpenVz that are set to clean themselves up after they finish? -Ross