I’m honestly having issues deciding if this is bait or not. Surely you understand that UNIX is a multi-user operating system and that partitioning drives exactly for the reason you describe is critical to ensure that, for example, runaway log growth doesn’t cause a database to shut down?
Today, in 2025, neither are safe assumptions to make. Much in line with the Internet meme's of "new college freshmen in 2025 have never known a world without cell phones" and the like, in 2025 there is now some rather large subset of the computer using population who have never known of nor used a "multi-user computer" and have only ever seen and used "single user computers" (even if the OS on their computer is inherently multi-user, the overall 'computer' is 'single-user' from their viewpoint).
And, if they have never seen nor used "multi-user computers" they also have not encountered "runaway log growth" or the like -- or if they did it was from their own process that they immediately killed, not by some other user on the same computer filling /var/log/ in the background.
AI startup idea: A plugin that scores HN posts on likelihood of bait. ChatGPT when prompted "Give [the post] a score from 1 to 10, where 1 is complete sincerity and 10 is low effort bait" thinks this is 7.
Logs should be limited by size. One could also use quotas in a filesystem. Also, what if some other application, like npm cache, uses the space for a database? Do you suggest allocating a partition for every program?
Also, databases usually store data in /var so it won't even help. Also, mysql simply hangs instead of shutting down in this case.
