Best Disk Partitioning Scheme for a Linux-based Developer Machine

Question

Is there some kind of "best disk partitioning scheme" for a Linux-based web and application developer machine, in terms of performance, organization or others?

Answer 1

Partitioning doesn't affects performance so much, but file systems and its configuration affects perfomance yes. Look at this benchmark. Little information about mounting options - fstab, especially look at atime options.

Partitioning has nothing with organization files in Linux, because in Linux is everything mounted into one tree.

I recommend one partition for system - / and separate partitions for folders where you place your work and personal data: /home and /var/www if you put your websites here, because if you change distro you will no need to do backup.

Answer 2

On our internal developement virtual machines we use three partitions:

1. /root partition - housing mostly static operating system stuff

2. /var partition - for all dynamic data

3. /home partition - this is where development takes place with the user accounts of the developers

The reason to separate the partitions is to avoid a system halt due to full filesystem. If /home is full - does not matter. No running processes are affected. Delete something, enlarge online and continue.

/ should not change much (the only exception is /tmp - but files there are usually never big).

/var is the place where /var/tmp and all other "live" data resides (including /var/log). A full /var/log is still the number one reason for system/application failures, so /var has to be big enough and there has to be a warning in time when space is becoming sparse there...

On physical machines, where disk space does not matter that much, we divide up additional "partitions" (mostly LVs), including: /var, /var/tmp, /var/log, /tmp, /boot, ... but these are production machines, where uptime matters.

Answer 3

At a minumum, I'd do:

1 partion for / 1 partition for /home (this would be most of the space)

Answer 4

I used to make separate partitions for /, /home, /usr/local and /var, but I always seemed to end up with some sort of interactions across partitions. If I did install a different distro, I would want to have the unused dotfiles removed for simplicity, so I still made a backup and wiped /home.

As for making a /var partition, I made so many sites at school (~100 or so), with such a large variance in sizes between media heavy sites and text only exercises, that it was impossible for me to accurately estimate the amount of space to allocate.

Now, I just have one partition for everything, and I don't come anywhere near filling it up. Personal media (movies, games, shows) go on an external HD, so that I can take it to a friend's house. For virtual machines, which have to be virtual appliances in virtualbox if you want to move them, I like to have a dedicated flash drive for each one.

I've never seen a HD crash, but if it did, I don't think it would matter how the physical drive was partitioned; it would just be dead. The riskiest thing I've ever done with my HD is resizing partitions, which is no longer necessary.