Bart Schaefer wrote:
On 4/3/07, John Summerfield debian@herakles.homelinux.org wrote:
Bart Schaefer wrote:
Eventually you should make a permanent swap out of a real disk partition, perhaps by adding a drive to the machine.
Why?
That may be anoher "informed opinion" question. I'm pretty sure that at one time it was the case that it was more efficient to swap to a
Arguably it was so, but then there's the convenience and the circumstances. The answers, I suspect, were always different between multidisk servers where one could dedicate a disk to the task, and the typical desktop system with one partition.
Take a CD-R someone's burned. You can see from the surface what's recorded on, what isn't.
Pretend the recorded-on bit is your data on the hard drive, the rest is the swap.
I reckon the kernel's footwork would have to be better than Fred Astaire's, to make up for the distance the heads have to seek back and forth.
A swap file could, of course, be at the edge of the recorded-on area, but then there's a good chance it's some place in the middle.
A means of placing a file in a "good" location would be handy.
However, one of the improvements in the 2.6 kernel is changes to swapping such that the partition no longer has the advantage.
device than to a file. Also at boot time it'd be nice to mount the swap before mounting the filesystems read/write. And I would think
Why? How much swap do you need to run fsck?
it's better to have all the swap in one continuous partition if you can.
Of course the other thing he could do is swapoff and remove the file once oracle is installed, on the grounds that the oracle engineers don't know what they're talking about.
Which is almost certainly the case, at least in some environments. If you can do disk I/O at four gigabytes/sec, swapping isn't nearly as harmful:-)