Re: nifty swapspace trick

On Mon, 29 Oct 2007, Larry Collier wrote:

> This would be very useful to speed up an older laptop though.

Not if you have the ability to put in more system memory instead. More
memory will always beat faster swap for performance. Bare in mind that most
flash memory types typically have a 2.5x worse write than read times because
of the requisite erase cycle. Standard RAM doesn't get penalized that
badly. Then factor in that most memory allocators in kernels operate much
faster when they don't have to age and flush pages into swap when they're
not under pressure.

The net result is that you should care less about swap performance than
avoiding it in the first place. If you can't upgrade your memory, then you
might consider it. And even then, only if the work you're doing is
non-critical, but at some point it will become unreliable (long before a
drive will).

         --Arthur Corliss
           Live Free or Die
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Received on Mon Oct 29 13:37:14 2007