On Monday 22 November 2004 01:50, Graham Campbell wrote: > About swapping I am not so sure. In the old days a swap partition was > specially formatted and swap I/O avoided the standard disk drivers and > gained quite a bit of efficiency. I do not know if this is still the > case. It also ensure you disk heads seek far away from the data to hit the swap, then all the way back. Judging from the timemkswap runs, any formatting is pretty minumal. I suspect it extends to writing a marker, "this is swap." One of the enhancements in 2.6 is improved swapping. Partitions don't have a performance advantage any more. Then there's the management issue. The ROT says size should be twice the size of available RAM. My Athlon has 512 Mbytes of RAM. Pretend it has 1 Gb swap. If I decide RAM is cheap, I'll add 1 Gbyte of RAM. What should I do with swap: 1. Extend it to 3 Gbytes? 2. Remove it? 3. Leave it be? 4. I'm confused. If it's been working fairly well before, I'd like to reclaim the disk space. Option 1 just seem too silly for words:-) Now, if it's a swap file then options 1 and 2 are dead simple. If it's a partition, it's basically a backup and restore operation so I'd probably opt for 3. Or not bother. -- Cheers John
