[ale] to lvm or not lvm is my dillema

[Steve Litt]

On Fri, 2 Jan 2026 15:51:32 -0500
Jeff Lightner via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:

> No.   If you increase physical RAM you often want to add SWAP
> devices. 
> 
> Having all your directories in a single partition instead of separate
> filesystems can cause issues down the road.   For years I've made it
> a point to have /boot, /root, /var and /usr separate because NOT
> doing so caused major issues.   Usually I'll have sub-mounted
> filesystems as well for things I expect to use a fair amount of
> space.   Having /root fill causing all sorts of issues that take a
> lot of effort to recover from (sometimes requiring a reinstall).    

This running out of space on the whole device can be easily guarded by
having a `df /` in your boot sequence, or in your ~.xinit. If something
goes really wrong and a terabyte file gets written, you can shut down,
boot from a rescue CD, and quickly clean up the mess. I have that
happen maybe once every 5 years. With /var, I'm assuming you have
functioning log rotation that's adjustable. With /usr , I have
everything and the kitchen sink in my /usr tree and it's only 54G. If I
absolutely needed the space, let's say I had a single 128GB disk, I
could do better housekeeping on old versions of TeX and kernels.

I understand that you're using mounted partitions analogously to
circuit breakers in your house, but at the cost that things can get
borked when your drive still has plenty of space, and in addressing
those borks, there's a non-trivial chance of making a data-losing
mistake.

By the way, I currently have /var on its own 192 GB partition because
that's how I learned how to do things in 1999, but next time I'll
probably just have it off the root.

Thank you for your post. In response I found that most of my space on
/var was gone, investigated, and found galaxy's worth of tiny files,
and deleted them, so now I'm using less than 1/2 of /var. I had similar
experiences on my /scratch partition, and brought usage down from
5.something TB to 1.9TB, including probably millions of tiny files.

Housekeeping is a huge part of this whole discussion, and thanks for
prodding me into doing housekeeping on stuff all the way back to 2003.
With those millions of files gone, for the first time in over a year
I can successfully complete a updatedb command. I've sorely missed
being able to search with the locate command.

By the way, check out the following command:

find ./* -exec ls -sadF {} \; | sort -n | tee ~/scratch_files.txt

I can then copy ~/scratch_files.txt to ./danger.sh in the current
directory, use Vim to delete the smaller files, then delete any lines
of files I still know, then turn them into a ./danger.sh shellscript
(not set executable). Then I just ksh ./danger.sh to get rid of the
obscenely big files. Since most people don't have ksh, they can just
use sh. Then immediately delete danger.sh so it doesn't create problems
down the line.

Soon I'm going create a program, to be run every day, to perform a 
du -s on strategic trees, and alarm when one goes above a certain
level. Such a program will be even more helpful on my next computer,
when I implement bind mounts for what used to be my partitions, because
you're right: I sure don't want / or the single huge partition on the
spinning rust to fill up. I'll be prompted to do housekeeping on more
than a once per decade basis :-).

SteveT

Steve Litt 
Featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful
Technologist http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques