Mailing List Archive

If you plan on adding more hard drives in the future, use LVM. I use
LVM and on top of that ext3. If you do decide to use LVM, make sure you
dont use the default physical extents because this will lead to a
maximum LVM size of 255 Gig. I have been there. I dont know if there
are any performance penalties though for increasing the physical extents
parameter.

Make sure whatever filesystem you choose, make it one that does not do
extensive fscks when the system does an abnormal shutdown. It is not
fun waiting for an fsck on a 200 gig hard drive. In short dont use ext2.






On Wed, 2003-08-06 at 19:50, Couvrette, Jeffrey C. wrote:
> I was wondering what the best way to set up the partitions and
> filesystem for best performance with MythTV. Would it be good to use
> a second harddrive to save video to, as it is recommended to do with
> video editting? Is it good to at least use a separate partition to
> save video to? What is the best filesystem to use on the partition
> where video will be saved? And, what are some of your recommendations
> on how to set up a basic Linux filesystem, such as a separate /boot,
> /usr, /temp, /home and / or not and what sizes do you typically use?
> If you want to answer specific to my system, I have a 2 GHz Celeron,
> 200 GB Harddrive, and 512MB memory, but I am curious what people use
> in general.
>
> Thanks for your help and a big thanks to everyone who has contributed
> to this great project.
>
> Jeff Couvrette
>
>
>
> ______________________________________________________________________
> _______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users@mythtv.org
> http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users

On Wed, 6 Aug 2003 17:50:14 -0700 Couvrette, Jeffrey C. wrote:
> I was wondering what the best way to set up the partitions
> and filesystem
> for best performance with MythTV. Would it be good to use a second
> harddrive to save video to, as it is recommended to do with
> video editting?
> Is it good to at least use a separate partition to save video
> to? What is
> the best filesystem to use on the partition where video will
> be saved? And,
> what are some of your recommendations on how to set up a basic Linux
> filesystem, such as a separate /boot, /usr, /temp, /home and
> / or not and
> what sizes do you typically use? If you want to answer specific to my
> system, I have a 2 GHz Celeron, 200 GB Harddrive, and 512MB
> memory, but I am
> curious what people use in general.

Jeffrey,

If you can, use LVM to split the video storage over multiple physical drives
as another reply suggested. (If you've got multiple physical drives, also be
sure to split your swap over them--not that you want to go into swap while
running myth.) For the most part you don't need any fancy partition scheme.
If you're reading sources that tell you to make a separate /boot, ignore
them; that was a workaround for old BIOSs. You might want a separate /home
if you're also going to be using this as a normal system and you like to
wipe the root filesystem when you reinstall. Personally, I'd rather just
move /home to another drive or system on those rare occasions.

Right now my root partition has 4.4G, but that includes /home and lots of
software I don't actually use. If you want to be conservative, give yourself
10G for the root partition. For that, use any filesystem that's
well-supported by your distro. Usually ext3 and reiserfs are good choices.
For the video storage, I'd recommend against reiserfs; it's optimized for
dealing with lots of little files. (This is great for your root partition,
which has lots of files--mine has FIXME.) Instead use ext3 and format it as
follows, where DEVICE is /dev/hda1 or whatever:
$ sudo /sbin/mkfs.ext3 -T largefile4 $DEVICE
$ sudo /sbin/tune2fs -c 0 -m 0 $DEVICE
The bigger the storage partition the better, of course. I wouldn't worry
about filesystem performance degrading on huge partitions since you'll have
relatively few files and they'll tend to be written once and not enlarged or
truncated.

--
Omer Shenker http://omershenker.net/

I don't think there are performance problems with larger extent sizes in
LVM. If you do use LVM, I would make:

/usr
/var
/var/log
/var/video (or wherever you want your mythTV data to reside
/home
/tmp

I would make / a real primary partition and let /boot reside on that as
well. I would also make a swap a real partition as well, although you
can make LVM swap partitions as needed.

You can use fewer, but with LVM there is no real disadvantage to
creating extra partitions except the time you spend during the install.
RH9 doesn't let you use reiserfs during the install (IIRC), but you
could use it on /var/video and set up that partition after install is
done. Anyway, I would use ext3 or another journaled filesystem for all
of the above except maybe / which you might want to use ext2 on.



On Wed, 2003-08-06 at 20:50, cmisip wrote:
> If you plan on adding more hard drives in the future, use LVM. I use
> LVM and on top of that ext3. If you do decide to use LVM, make sure you
> dont use the default physical extents because this will lead to a
> maximum LVM size of 255 Gig. I have been there. I dont know if there
> are any performance penalties though for increasing the physical extents
> parameter.
>
> Make sure whatever filesystem you choose, make it one that does not do
> extensive fscks when the system does an abnormal shutdown. It is not
> fun waiting for an fsck on a 200 gig hard drive. In short dont use ext2.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, 2003-08-06 at 19:50, Couvrette, Jeffrey C. wrote:
> > I was wondering what the best way to set up the partitions and
> > filesystem for best performance with MythTV. Would it be good to use
> > a second harddrive to save video to, as it is recommended to do with
> > video editting? Is it good to at least use a separate partition to
> > save video to? What is the best filesystem to use on the partition
> > where video will be saved? And, what are some of your recommendations
> > on how to set up a basic Linux filesystem, such as a separate /boot,
> > /usr, /temp, /home and / or not and what sizes do you typically use?
> > If you want to answer specific to my system, I have a 2 GHz Celeron,
> > 200 GB Harddrive, and 512MB memory, but I am curious what people use
> > in general.
> >
> > Thanks for your help and a big thanks to everyone who has contributed
> > to this great project.
> >
> > Jeff Couvrette
> >
> >
> >
> > ______________________________________________________________________
> > _______________________________________________
> > mythtv-users mailing list
> > mythtv-users@mythtv.org
> > http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
>
>
> ______________________________________________________________________
>
> _______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users@mythtv.org
> http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users

Just as a note, RedHat 9 can be installed with reiserfs during the install
by issuing "linux reiserfs" at the boot: prompt ( without the quotes ).
You'll then have the option to format partitions as reiserfs during the
partitioning section of the install.


dhardison

-----Original Message-----
From: mythtv-users-bounces@mythtv.org
[mailto:mythtv-users-bounces@mythtv.org]On Behalf Of Aran Cox
Sent: Thursday, August 07, 2003 3:49 PM
To: Discussion about mythtv
Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] Partition and Filesystem choices for MythTV


I don't think there are performance problems with larger extent sizes in
LVM. If you do use LVM, I would make:

/usr
/var
/var/log
/var/video (or wherever you want your mythTV data to reside
/home
/tmp

I would make / a real primary partition and let /boot reside on that as
well. I would also make a swap a real partition as well, although you
can make LVM swap partitions as needed.

You can use fewer, but with LVM there is no real disadvantage to
creating extra partitions except the time you spend during the install.
RH9 doesn't let you use reiserfs during the install (IIRC), but you
could use it on /var/video and set up that partition after install is
done. Anyway, I would use ext3 or another journaled filesystem for all
of the above except maybe / which you might want to use ext2 on.



On Wed, 2003-08-06 at 20:50, cmisip wrote:
> If you plan on adding more hard drives in the future, use LVM. I use
> LVM and on top of that ext3. If you do decide to use LVM, make sure you
> dont use the default physical extents because this will lead to a
> maximum LVM size of 255 Gig. I have been there. I dont know if there
> are any performance penalties though for increasing the physical extents
> parameter.
>
> Make sure whatever filesystem you choose, make it one that does not do
> extensive fscks when the system does an abnormal shutdown. It is not
> fun waiting for an fsck on a 200 gig hard drive. In short dont use ext2.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, 2003-08-06 at 19:50, Couvrette, Jeffrey C. wrote:
> > I was wondering what the best way to set up the partitions and
> > filesystem for best performance with MythTV. Would it be good to use
> > a second harddrive to save video to, as it is recommended to do with
> > video editting? Is it good to at least use a separate partition to
> > save video to? What is the best filesystem to use on the partition
> > where video will be saved? And, what are some of your recommendations
> > on how to set up a basic Linux filesystem, such as a separate /boot,
> > /usr, /temp, /home and / or not and what sizes do you typically use?
> > If you want to answer specific to my system, I have a 2 GHz Celeron,
> > 200 GB Harddrive, and 512MB memory, but I am curious what people use
> > in general.
> >
> > Thanks for your help and a big thanks to everyone who has contributed
> > to this great project.
> >
> > Jeff Couvrette
> >
> >
> >
> > ______________________________________________________________________
> > _______________________________________________
> > mythtv-users mailing list
> > mythtv-users@mythtv.org
> > http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
>
>
> ______________________________________________________________________
>
> _______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users@mythtv.org
> http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users


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