Re: nifty swapspace trick

On Mon, 29 Oct 2007, bryanm@acsalaska.net wrote:

> I don't know if this is common knowledge or not, but I had
> never heard of the idea before.
>
> While listening in on my boss teaching a computer class, I
> heard him mention that Windows Vista has a new feature that
> allows you to use a flash drive as virtual memory. Since
> USB (and especially USB 2.0) runs faster than a hard drive,
> a flash drive is an easy way to boost your memory performance.
>
> After rolling the idea around in my head a bit, I decided that
> it might be easy to do the same thing in Linux using common
> built-in tools. I had to try it to be sure, but it works!
>
> All you have to do is:
> 1) plug in the flash drive and get the system to recognize it
> 2) run mkswap to quickly format it
> 3) run swapon to start using it
>
> Running 'free' will show you that you have extra memory available.

Something you'd never want to do on a production server, only for
non-critical things like desktops. Bare in mind that flash memory does have
a very limited number of writes before it becomes unreliable. Ultimately,
it will probably be smarter to just spend a little more for system memory
than flash devices, and you'll get even more performance then that.

         --Arthur Corliss
           Live Free or Die
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Received on Mon Oct 29 12:55:26 2007