Willie Wong writes:
> When the filesystem fills up, services can start failing left and
> right because they cannot write logs, cannot write temp files, etc. At
> this point human intervention is necessary: root has to log in and
> clear out the disk. But if the $ROOT filesystem is completely full,
> one may not even be able to log in and/or that one cannot do any sort
> of maintenance that is needed. So you have some sort of circularity.
> (In which case you have to reboot, perhaps using another medium...)
>
> The way out is to reserve some breathing room for root so that when
> everybody else is having problems he can still get in and fix the
> problem.
>
> The 5% is historical from days when disks are much smaller. If you
> have a sensible partition scheme you only really need to reserve the
> blocks on the $ROOT filesystem. If the partition in question (IIRC) is
> only for /home, then you can just turn off the reserved blocks all
> together.
Isn't another purpose of those 5% the reduction of fragmentation that
occurs more when there is few free space left? Although I also reduce ift
on very large partitions. But I never set it to exactly zero.
Wonko
