[PlanetCCRMA] Re: PlanetCCRMA digest, Vol 1 #1701 - 6 msgs

[Jan Depner]

On Mon, 2006-05-01 at 17:16 -0400, Mark Shuford wrote:

> ---
> I've not used reiser... no answer for you there. I'll defer...
> Both reiser and ext3 are journaled fs'es. In general, performance may be 
> a bit lower on these. If this is a major issue w/ you then you may want 
> ext2.
> Lots of tweaking can be done on all of these... so RTFM and YMMV. :)
> 

    I've used Reiser 3 and it works fine.  I wouldn't use it now, I'd
probably go for ext3 or XFS.  I haven't used Reiser 4 so can't comment
on that.  I wouldn't use ext2 because there is a real possibility of
hanging your system when running intensive audio applications.  If
you're not running a journaled file system you increase your chances of
losing data.  Plus, waiting for fsck fsucks ;-)

> ---
> In general: put the /boot partition on the first (physical) primary 
> partition on the drive. This puts the 2nd stage boot loader at the first 
> sectors of the disk and assures it to  be accessible from the BIOS/first 
> stage boot-loader.
> But, the boot loader can all go on the MBR and then you don't really 
> have to worry about all of this. Or if your / (root) partition is not 
> all that large (you've doled out other fs'es to other partitions) and 
> there's no chance of the /boot directory being too far in (physically) 
> on the disk, you can forgo the /boot partition altogether and just let 
> it reside in the root fs.
> 

    The main reason for making a separate /boot partition is that if you
hose / and /boot is on it you may be done.  /boot only gets used at boot
time so the chance of hosing it on it's own partition is pretty small.

> Often I will have a relatively small first hard-drive in my system for 
> /, /usr, and maybe swap. Then the /var and /home fs'es go on another 
> hard-drive. And I'll have these on separate IDE channels. The idea is to 
> keep your busy activity to hard-disks spread across drives and 
> controllers. (Two IDE drives on one controller get in each others way 


    I put /boot, swap, and / on a single system drive and put my audio
data on a second drive (as above, on separate IDE controllers).  You
don't want to put /var on the audio drive, there's a lot of system I/O
going there (/var/log for instance).


> On my CCRMA system I've got a third controller going to a remove-able 
> drive caddy for my data. Independent stream for all the through-put I 
> can get. Looking to stripe this with a hardware RAID-1 when/as/if 
> needed. And the remove-able caddy lets me separate projects.
> 
> ---
> If you've got swap... I tripled (3x) performance on both my Linux and MS 
> Win 2000 Pro boxes a few years ago by putting the swap (Linux) and swap 
> part file (Win) (and Netscape/Internet Exploiter caches) on separate 
> physical drives and controllers from the areas where I was reading and 
> writing data and/or doing a lot of program loads. Both machines were 
> rather low in RAM... you'll not get that dramatic an increase if you've 
> already got RAM, RAM, RAM, RAM... (Lovely RAM! Wonderful RAM!)
> 

    Always have swap space.  It's just a buffer for memory overflow.  If
you aren't using all of your physical memory it just sits there and does
nothing.  If you use up all of your physical memory and you don't have
swap space your system is going down (and if you're running ext2 you get
to fsck ;-)

> It all depends on the mix of what your disk I/O consists of.
> 
> For high performance and low latency plenty of RAM is to be desired. The 
> more buffer space you've got the I/O will be happier. But as to if you 
> need to call swap bad... it depends on what you are swapping out to the 
> disk as to if it is a read problem... and the swapping strategy used. 
> Not a simple answer for this one, really.
> 
> But, for a low latency system -- our Holy Grail here -- swap: generally 
> to be avoided.
> 
> ---
> Also, process/context switching to be avoided. Don't run more stuff than 
> you need. Custom config your kernel to get rid of all the stuff you do 
> not need. Shut down not currently used network interfaces (DON'T just 
> shutdown networking -- if the loopback interface is down... well, lots 
> of stuff will break bad)

    Only true in some instances if you're running something like KDE or
Gnome.  I run Fluxbox for serious recording and shut down the network
with no problems.  I usually run KDE and don't shut it down when I'm
doing mixdown.


    My system is set up thusly:

Drive 0
/boot - 100MB
swap - 2047MB
/ - whatever is left

Drive 1
/audio - the whole drive


    I've always subscribed to the KISS principle ;-)

-- 
Jan 'Evil Twin' Depner
The Fuzzy Dice
http://myweb.cableone.net/eviltwin69/fuzzy.html


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