Bart Schaefer wrote: > On 4/3/07, John Summerfield <debian at 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:-) -- Cheers John -- spambait 1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu Z1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu Please do not reply off-list