UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Areas worth checking:

Is the application using Operating System work space for temporary files? A badly-written application might use /tmp for example.

Are you gathering too many server statistics? I've seen busy server grind to a halt when it was set to run unix Process Accounting.

Does the application make heavy use of unix services such as email and printing?


I have seen perfectly satisfactory Oracle systems running under unix on a single RAID array with no dedicated system disc. What really mattered was tuning the Oracle SGA and PGA.

I do separate OS (all LVM) mirror for rootvg/vg00 with only OS and preferably on separate controllers, and the rest (data and appl...) on RAID5 on SAN etc.
The reason is I have no test box.. and when it come to upgrade/sensible patching , can break the mirror and "rollback" if needed, without having to change anything else...
Correlation on I/O would be difficult with this architecture. but I have seen big boxes suffer (multiple oracle apps...) because of /tmp /var/tmp not purged enough ( and so it is not the volume but how many files present here that can ruin performance...)

In reality, it rarely matters on most server applications.

Really.

In fact, more often than not when people partition like that, thinking they are going to gain performance or something else, they find the partition they made was too small and they have other problems down the road.

I generally never it anymore when setting up disk partitions. It simply is not necessary for most applications, but that is just my opinion.

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And when tmp is full you can have other problems like applications crash and don't work because they can't write to tmp.

So, I don't think there is a good idea in making tmp small so it cannot grow large. It needs to grow and with very simple monitoring, it can easily be managed as far as size.