Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of gddl630
gddl630Flag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

asked on

web server partitioning best practices

I need to rebuild a web server because usage has massively increased and presently the 12mb php per script limit is using all of the server's memory at times. the new machine is likely to have 8Gb of RAM

any suggestions as to how the partitioning should change?
df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda7             2.0G  561M  1.4G  30% /
/dev/sda3             190M   20M  161M  11% /boot
none                  989M     0  989M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda8            1012M   33M  928M   4% /tmp
/dev/sda5             9.7G  4.5G  4.7G  49% /usr
/dev/sda6             9.7G  977M  8.2G  11% /var
/dev/sda2             2.5G  840M  1.6G  36% /home
/dev/sda10            108G   53G   51G  51% /usr2
/usr2/design          108G   53G   51G  51% /home/design/disk2
/usr2/www/3andout/changelife
                      108G   53G   51G  51% /home/changelife/changelife

Open in new window

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of WizRd-Linux
WizRd-Linux
Flag of Australia image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Avatar of Michael Worsham
I recommend using LVM whenever and whereever at all possible. From a system administration perspective, it just makes it easier to extend logical volume mounts as needed. It also prevents runaway processing from taking down your system if the root filesystem filles up.

All of my systems have the following layout (created via kickstarting):

/dev/sda2              4061572    773784   3078140  21% /
/dev/mapper/vg00-home  1015704    220600    742676  23% /home
/dev/mapper/vg00-tmp   1015704     34108    929168   4% /tmp
/dev/mapper/vg00-usr   4062912   1761360   2091840  46% /usr
/dev/mapper/vg00-opt    507748     19588    461946   5% /opt
/dev/mapper/vg00-var   2031440    346344   1580240  18% /var
/dev/mapper/vg00-web   6192704    177256   5700940   4% /web
/dev/sda1               194442     24676    159727  14% /boot
tmpfs                   513408         0    513408   0% /dev/shm

Open in new window

SOLUTION
Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
for space utilization, I recommend LVM so you could increse the space whenever need. But if you wanna performance and redundency, then go for Raid 5.

Best Luck.
Avatar of gddl630

ASKER

thanks WizRd-Linux

the existing machine is also running a very old RHEL version, why is also why we decided to build a new one.

the machine is a web server running the following on Cent OS: Apache / SSL / PHP / MYSQL / FreeTDS - MySQL is barely used the sites are using FreeTDS to access MSSQL server for an in-house built app.

the new machine will be a VM running on ESXv4 so I guess we are relaxed for space, but what is better?
- allocate more space from now and not use LVM;
- or use LVM and expand as needed?
use LVM (all days of the week)!