swap

Bill McGonigle bill at bfccomputing.com
Sun Jan 30 13:12:01 EST 2005


This seems pretty easy to benchmark but my google-fu is not strong 
enough this morning to find one.

If you are using a swapfile you probably don't want it on a 
data-journaled filesystem, but a metadata-journaled filesystem should 
be OK.  Mounting noatime would be smart since it's going to be updating 
atime constantly, especially as load increases, mucking up the head 
dynamics.

But then you're left with a special kind of filesystem to put a 
swapfile on, so what's different then than a swap parition?

MacOSX makes this tradeoff, especially since their swapfile can size 
dynamically.  This can also be dangerous - I've pounded RAM into swap 
on OSX such taht it left insufficient space for my apps to save their 
prefs <error handling grumble...> resulting in corrupt application 
preferences.  People gunning for performance on OSX force it onto a 
separate parition/drive.

Is there a way to make the linux swapfile size dynamically?  Otherwise 
what have you gained?  There may be a case where performance is 
critical and you can't install more RAM and you can't install a second 
drive, such that you have to rely on head dynamics but that seems like 
an edge case.

-Bill
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