Properly partitioning your system also allows you to tune newfs(8), and
tunefs(8) parameters. The only tunefs(8) option worthwhile turning on is
softupdates with ``tunefs -n enable /filesystem''. Softupdates drasti-
cally improves meta-data performance, mainly file creation and deletion.
We recommend enabling softupdates on most file systems; however, there
are two limitations to softupdates that you should be aware of when
determining whether to use it on a file system. First, softupdates guar-
antees file system consistency in the case of a crash but could very eas-
ily be several seconds (even a minute!) behind on pending write to the
physical disk. If you crash you may lose more work than otherwise. Sec-
ondly, softupdates delays the freeing of file system blocks. If you have
a file system (such as the root file system) which is close to full,
doing a major update of it, e.g., ``make installworld'', can run it out
of space and cause the update to fail. For this reason, softupdates will
not be enabled on the root file system during a typical install. There
is no loss of performance since the root file system is rarely written
to.