Re: Faster swap by using separate disk?
Mark Phillips writes:
>
>
> I have been wondering about whether putting a swap partition on one IDE
> drive, while putting most of linux on a different IDE drive will speed up
> swap by allowing both disks to be accessed at the same time.
>
> Unfortunately I think I read somewhere that when you have a Master/Slave
> IDE pair, only one of the disks can be accessed at any one time, so that
> having the swap partition on a separate disk doesn't help.
>
> However my motherboard is capable of using 4 ide devices. It has two
> pairs:
>
> Primary Master/Primary Slave
> and
> Secondary Master/Secondary Slave
>
> What if I put linux on one of the primary disks, and the swap partition on
> a secondary disk, will that mean both disks can be accessed at the same
> time, hence giving a swap speedup?
You need to think in terms of available "bandwidth". If the swap partition is
on the same cable as the root partition, then it has to share the bandwidth
with the other partition(s). Moving the swap partition to the secondary
controller (where it is by itself), will increase available bandwidth. You can
use this trick with a CDROM drive also. The second thing that you can do is to
move up to the new "ultra-DMA" IDE drives. The bandwidth (bytes per second) is
much higher than the standard IDE drives and will speed up Linux as a whole.
The third thing that you can do to speed up your system is add more memory so
that you don't even need to access the swap partition. And lastly, if you are
using EDO memory SIMMs and your motherboard supports SDRAM memory, switch over
to SDRAM. You can get a large speed up doing this alone. My kernel
compile times used to be ~35 minutes. When I changed from EDO to SDRAM, the
kernel compile times dropped to 12 minutes (without any other changes).
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Thomas Kocourek KD4CIK
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