De-activate a swap partition - I don't believe it!

[Gene Heskett]

On Tuesday 21 March 2006 16:38, Christofer C. Bell wrote:
>On 3/19/06, jdow <jdow at earthlink.net> wrote:
>> (Hint, there is at least partitioning HOW-TO with some hints on
>> where the swap files ought to go. Three partitions are usually
>> called for. /boot, /, and swap. Ordering depends on the performance
>> you need. If you go to swap a lot - put it near the outside of the
>> disk. If you do not go to swap at all often then put it anywhere you
>> want, it'll not make a huge difference.)
>
>I don't know what the HOWTO says about swap, but if you're going to be
>hitting swap a lot, you want it on the inside tracks of the disk where
>the sectors are closer together physically (because they're smaller).
>Less space traveled by the disk head = faster access times.

No, sorry.  The track spaceing remains the same, but there are fewer 
sectors due to the smaller circumference of the inner tracks, so seek 
time is a wash.  The exact same size file that takes 10 tracks on the 
outside of the disk might need 11 tracks on the inside so ther would be 
one more seek of what, 8 ms to get the last piece?

I have a tendency to put the busy stuff on the outer tracks just because 
there less seeking with the longer tracks, but in reality, I think 
someone would have to write a program that played with an otherwise 
un-occupied disk as a test for finding any real diffs because they're 
probably going to be in the under 20% range.  Thats less than switching 
from a 5400 rpm drive to a 7200 rpm drive, which pays a much larger 
dividend in performance in my experience.

>Then again, swap is universally slow and I personally don't think it
>matters where it goes.

Thats why if the choice is a bigger drive or more memory, I always go 
for the memory, with a gig in this box I've used swap once in the last 
year.

>--
>Chris
>
>"I trust the Democrats to take away my money, which I can afford.  I
>trust the Republicans to take away my freedom, which I cannot."

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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