On Sun, 08 May 2011 07:28:49 +0300 Nadav Har'El <n...@math.technion.ac.il> wrote:
> Instead of buying a huge SSD for "thousands of dollars" another option you > might consider is to buy a relatively small SSD with just enough space to > hold your "/" partition and swap space. Even 20 G may be enough. > The rest of your disk - holding your source code, photos, songs, movies, > or whatever you typically fill a terabyte with, will be a normal, cheap, > hard disk. I don't agree with this setup. Regular consumer drives setup with RAID to stripe are going to be much, much faster and have less problems in the long run than single SSDs at this point as well as being a better value until prices change a lot. Consider not using swap, because swap when in use causes a lot of thrashing and kills performance especially if you only have 1 or 2 drives. If you have a reasonably fast CPU (as the OP wrote) and more than 1G of RAM you can live without swap. Try it and like it: /sbin/swapoff -a Run for a few days and see if your performance doesn't improve. The only problem I can think of is if you run leaky code and don't have swap your system will lock up sooner. If you do have swap perhaps you will be able to see it coming. Another thing to consider is what filesystem(s) you use and what your mountpoints are. That's a religious debate and I'm not going to get into it except to say different filesystems have different advantages and disadvantages and it's worthwhile to do a bit of research to see which one(s) will work for you. You might consider one filesystem for volatile directories like /tmp and /var/log and others for relatively static filesystems like /. You should also consider your whole filesystem structure and the way you have mountpoints set up. If you have one big filesystem for everything (common but incorrect desktop config) you are not going to get the best performance possible. _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
