swap

Jerry Feldman gaf at blu.org
Sun Jan 30 08:36:01 EST 2005


On Sat, 29 Jan 2005 22:38:36 -0500 (EST)
Benjamin Scott <bscott at ntisys.com> wrote:

> On Sat, 29 Jan 2005, at 6:15pm, jonathan at linowes.com wrote:
> > Does the swap area have to be a partition or can it be a file? 
> > if it can, are there any disadvantage to doing this?
> 
>   It used to be that putting swap in a file was slower then putting it
in a
> partition.
> 
>   I don't know if this is still the case.  I also don't know if
"slower"  
> was "significantly slower" (especially given that swap is already
orders of
> magnitude slower then RAM).
> 
>   I usually use a dedicated swap partition, but only because I usually
know
> what I want for swap going in to a build.
When configuring swap, you must consider locality and use. Also remember
that the text (code portion) of a program and library will swap from
their locations, and not be placed in the swap area. 

While using a swapfile is generally slower, if you have a very large
busy partition allocated, and your swap partition is located
significantly far away from that partition, head movement will be a
factor, and possibly a swapfile may be faster. 

Normally, I place my swap partition between the root and /home
partitions. It's also good to have it on a second disk. 

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9
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