Hard drive scenario

[jsnape]

I ordered a new server and am considering this as a partitioning scheme. Can anyone think of a better way. My goal is to never have to watch disc space like a hawk again, but not overspend. The server will be a pretty full cpanel based server. Right now this is my typical problem:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda5 2.9G 1.2G 1.7G 42% /
/dev/sda1 773M 78M 656M 11% /boot
/dev/sda8 42G 33G 7.2G 82% /home
none 1004M 0 1004M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda3 9.7G 6.7G 2.5G 73% /usr
/dev/sda2 9.7G 6.9G 2.3G 76% /var
/dev/hda1 74G 67G 3.6G 95% /backup
/dev/hdb1 74G 32G 38G 46% /home2
/usr/tmpDSK 243M 34M 197M 15% /tmp
/tmp 243M 34M 197M 15% /var/tmp



cPanel's 40 GB recommendation.
/boot 35 Megabytes (Mb)
/usr 4096+ Mb (If you have a 60 gig drive try 6144 for /usr, 8192 if you have an 80 gig drive, etc.)
/var 1500+ Mb
/tmp 512+ Mb
/ 1024 Mb
/home grow to fill disk
swap 2x memory size




My plan:

1280 GB scenario
4 Seagate 320GB SATA-II striped & mirrored

/boot 200 MB
/usr 60 GB
/var 60 GB
/tmp 30 GB
/ 30 GB
swap 12GB (considering server has 6GB RAM)


/home roughly 400 GB

/backup 2 Seagate 750GB HD striped

Offsite monthly backups (3 previous months worth)

[chirpy]

Those are some big disks.

Personally, with modern drives and file systems, if you don't want to worry about partitions becoming full you could put almost everything in /:

/boot 100MB (should be no need for more)
/tmp 2GB (shouldn't need more)
swap (2*RAM)
/ Everything else

Since you're going to have on- and off- server backups, the advantages of having separate partitions for /usr and /var probably outweigh the desire for a simpler file system structure. Purists would disagree with putting mostly everything in /, but it does make life easier.

[jsnape]

Thanks for the info. Everything in / is (or at least used to be) the way ev1 sets them up. I always thought it was wrong. Maybe I'll do it that way if it doesn't make a difference. As far as being big drives - not long ago I thought 40 GB was huge, now 40 GB is a ticking timebomb and a nuisance.


Every six months I have to re-evaluate disc space offerings of other legit web hosting companies, usually by checking this page and checking around - http://www.hostingdiscussion.com/industry/ and always end up increasing the allowance, to which my customers quickly take advantage of.

I'm hoping for a good clustering, failover solution for cPanel in the next couple of years. Or at least the ability to move mail processing to a separate server.

[kapOcha]

Hello there,

I have the same problem, a lot of perl proccess are eatting up my server resources, the cpu load is above to 10. The following is the top report:

9298 nobody 25 0 7656 3252 1592 R 9.9 0.2 54:46.13 perl
9685 nobody 25 0 8620 3256 1592 R 9.9 0.2 57:21.39 perl
16366 nobody 25 0 7668 3252 1592 R 9.9 0.2 54:48.81 perl
22634 nobody 25 0 8332 3272 1592 R 9.9 0.2 54:41.81 perl
22919 nobody 25 0 9236 3256 1592 R 9.9 0.2 54:45.30 perl
22928 nobody 25 0 9028 3252 1592 R 9.9 0.2 54:43.32 perl
18913 nobody 25 0 8164 3256 1592 R 8.9 0.2 54:46.59 perl
9293 nobody 25 0 9124 3252 1592 R 3.0 0.2 54:44.14 perl

Now I give you the "lsof -p 9298" report:

perl 8019 nobody cwd DIR 3,6 4096 2 /
perl 8019 nobody rtd DIR 3,6 4096 2 /
perl 8019 nobody txt REG 3,2 969059 66043 /usr/bin/perl
perl 8019 nobody mem REG 3,6 97516 32285 /lib/libnsl-2.3.6.so
perl 8019 nobody mem REG 3,6 28544 32187 /lib/libcrypt-2.3.6.so
perl 8019 nobody mem REG 3,2 23186 651099 /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.7/i686-linux/auto/Socket/Socket.so
perl 8019 nobody mem REG 3,6 47380 32207 /lib/libnss_files-2.3.6.so
perl 8019 nobody mem REG 3,6 22584 32240 /lib/libnss_dns-2.3.6.so
perl 8019 nobody mem REG 3,6 112236 32141 /lib/ld-2.3.6.so
perl 8019 nobody mem REG 3,6 1525032 144348 /lib/tls/libc-2.3.6.so
perl 8019 nobody mem REG 3,6 213992 144349 /lib/tls/libm-2.3.6.so
perl 8019 nobody mem REG 3,6 16800 32148 /lib/libdl-2.3.6.so
perl 8019 nobody mem REG 3,6 81184 32280 /lib/libresolv-2.3.6.so
perl 8019 nobody mem REG 3,6 15916 33000 /lib/libutil-2.3.6.so
perl 8019 nobody mem REG 3,2 17456 650902 /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.7/i686-linux/auto/IO/IO.so
perl 8019 nobody mem REG 3,2 48537008 227367 /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive
perl 8019 nobody 0r CHR 1,3 1938 /dev/null
perl 8019 nobody 1w FIFO 0,5 27550 pipe
perl 8019 nobody 2w REG 3,2 598429770 214972 /usr/local/apache/logs/error_log

Then, the perl proccess browses the domlogs folder.


Any help?
Greetings.

[cpanelkenneth]

Although I have yet to try it with cPanel, I prefer to use LVM. This allows me to easily grow my filesystems without dealing with multiple mount points. Using LVM, I can create a simple straightforward setup like you proposed, then allocate more space to different areas on the fly. If I need to add more drives down the road, it is a simple matter of installing the drive and adding it to the LVM pool.

For the truly fun, you can combin LVM with RAID

An added bonus, if you have the drive space, is LVM supports filesystem snapshots, which are great for augmenting your backup scenarios.

[Lyttek]

For the truly fun, you can combin LVM with RAID

I've done this... took me five or six tries before I got the results I wanted... a bit complicated

[cpanelkenneth]

I've done this... took me five or six tries before I got the results I wanted... a bit complicated

Yeah, I was being facetious. While it can be done, i don't really recommend it as it makes adding more drives very complex, increases the error-prone chance and will eiether increase downtime when adding new drives or hurt performance while the RAID portion is rebuilt/verified after adding the drive.

LVM on it's own is great.

[myusername]

Kenneth,

Did you every get around to trying LVM on cPanel?

[cpanelkenneth]

Kenneth,

Did you every get around to trying LVM on cPanel?

No. The box I requisitioned for this (a used one) ended up being bad, so I'm waiting on the replacement. It's still on my TODO list.

My guess is it should perform adequately, as long as you don't use any of the Hard drive stuff in WHM.

[myusername]

Aha...thanks, that could have saved me from some accidental button pressing. Maybe one day we will see LVS support in cP to disable such hazardous things a guy like me might actually press.

Let us know how it goes if you remember!