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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