[geeks] Choice of filesystem for /var

Geoffrey S. Mendelson gsm at mendelson.com
Thu Oct 19 06:23:48 CDT 2006


On Thu, Oct 19, 2006 at 01:12:36PM +0200, Miichael Vergalen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> for the /var filesystem wich I' going to move to a bigger set of disks 
> what do you recommend to use as filesystem ? I was thinking of placing 
> /var on either a zfs filesystem  or  a  raid1  filesystem.... but I 
> don't know what would be the best for this filesystem because it gets 
> written to a lot with all the logs etc.

Since you did not specify operating systems, I'll take a guess (probably
wrong) and assume you mean Linux. I would use EXT3 as it is journaled,
and has relatively low overhead. 

Whatever you use, make sure it is journaled so that you can see as much of
the logs as possible after a crash.

BTW, your question does not make a lot of sense, ZFS is a file system,
raid1 is a storage method. You can't actually use raid1 without some sort
of file system on top of it. 

If your /var file system is very active or your disks are small, raid1 makes
a lot of sense. If it is not very active (how much data do you log?), then
just a regular journaled file system would do.

If you really have a lot of log data, IMHO you should consider some sort
of filter to remove the useless junk. 

Geoff.
-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
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