Sun Performance and Tuning: Java™ and the Internet, Second Edition

Disk Configuration Trade-off

Let’s say you’re setting up a large server that replaces several smaller ones so it will handle a bit of everything: NFS, a couple of large databases, home directories, number crunching, intranet home pages. Do you just make one big file system and throw the lot in, or do you need to set up lots of different collections of disks?

Several trade-offs need to be made, and there is no one solution. The main factors to balance are the administrative complexity, resilience to disk failure, and the performance requirements of each workload component.

There are two underlying factors to take into account: the filesystem type and whether the access pattern is primarily random or sequential access. I’ve shown these factors ...