Solaris 10 partitioning

Question

I have a Sun Blade with 2048 MB ram running Solaris 10. I performed a clean install of the 11/06 release last month. I allocated 6 GB for the / partition, 750 MB for swap (+ 150MB in a separate, stand-alone file using swap -a), 3GB for /export/home, and 27 GB in a large data area (/space). Already, after patching, my / partition is 92% full. The df -h output below shows 2.2 GB of swap, which doesn't match what I allocated, and the output is confusing with 3 different entries for swap (/etc/svc/volatile, /tmp, /var/run).
For a stand-alone system used for applications (not a server), what is the recommended size for the / partition? 5.4GB used with only the base Sol 10 software, SunStudio 11, and a few other small software packages seems excessive. Plus, I will have to install other software later that I think installs into /opt. Is /opt included on the / partition (I think so)? Should I just reinstall Sol 10 and allocated about 8 GB for the / partition?
df -hFilesystem size used avail capacity Mounted on
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 5.9G 5.4G 509M 92% /
/devices 0K 0K 0K 0% /devices
ctfs 0K 0K 0K 0% /system/contract
proc 0K 0K 0K 0% /proc
mnttab 0K 0K 0K 0% /etc/mnttab
swap 2.1G 1.0M 2.1G 1% /etc/svc/volatile
objfs 0K 0K 0K 0% /system/object
fd 0K 0K 0K 0% /dev/fd
swap 2.1G 96K 2.1G 1% /tmp
swap 2.1G 48K 2.1G 1% /var/run
/dev/dsk/c0t2d0s7 37G 12G 24G 33% /data1
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s3 27G 1.7G 25G 7% /space
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s7 3.0G 629M 2.3G 22% /export/home

Answer 1

8GB is the default on the Blade that I had, and it's way too small if you add apps such as StarOffice 8. I personally try to shoot for 20GB plus for /, but obviously if your drives aren't that big, you may have to compromise some.
Also, the "typically accepted" values for swap are "twice RAM". Not sure who came up with that, or how valid it is, but that's how Unix sysadmins around the world have been setting up Unix forever :)
/opt can be separate if you want, or you can let it be on the / partition. Sometimes on smaller drives I find it easier to manage if I just let all the stuff (other than swap) hang straight off of /. On systems with bigger drives, there's enough space to separate them and gain the benefit of, for example, having /var separate so that a runaway log can't fill up your entire /!