On Tue, 28 Jan 2003 12:34:47 +0100
Nicos Gollan <gtdev@spearhead.de> wrote:
> According to what a prof. said, swapspace should be placed outside any
> filesystems since that filesystem would add to the already gigantic overhead
> the disk produces by adding a layer of indirection (look up the file,
> reposition the head, start reading swap).
This is entirely true. It is also a rule of thumb. IE without knowing
the specific situation it is the best answer as it is correct in most
situations.
However my machine has ~900Mb of RAM and at any given moment has 600Mb
free. That's with KDE 3.1, Sylpheed-Claws, XOSView, 2 Half-Life Dedicated
servers, Apache, Proftyp, mysql and various other services running 24/7. In
the past month my need for swap has been 0. On the other hand my need for
128Mb of disk space has been greater as / is tiny (made it too small) and even
my largest partition to which I symlink about 1/2 my tree fluctuates between
1Gb and <20Mb.
End result is no real loss of performance as my machine hardly ever swaps
and a net gain in disk space as the largely unused swap partition is merged
into another one that needs it. On top of that if my machine ever does need
swap in a large way I have dynamic allocation turned on. 128Mb of swap was ok
back when this HD started in a machine with 64Mb of RAM and a P5-100. Now
that it is in a machine with ~900Mb and 2 PIII-650s things have changed. If I
need swap there is a chance I'll need more than 128Mb and this gives me the
chance to go far higher than that.
--
Steve C. Lamb | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
ICQ: 5107343 | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
To email: Don't despair! | -- Lenny Nero, Strange Days
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