[Gllug] Cloning only one of two partitions & how necessary is swapspace...

[general_email at technicalbloke.com]

Christopher Hunter wrote:
> On Sat, 2010-04-10 at 03:04 +0100, general_email at technicalbloke.com 
> wrote:
>   
>> My other (fairly unimportant and quite possibly already discussed to
>> death here in the past) question is about swap space. Although I
>> understand the terrible write endurance of SSDs is rapidly becoming an
>> myth/anachronism I am curious if there is a downside to running without
>> swap? I assume I would lose the ability to hibernate if I disable it so
>> I'll probably keep it, I'm just wondering if anything bad might happen
>> if I didn't.
>>     
>
> It's probably still a bad idea to try too many read / write operations
> to SSD, so swap (which is still necessary unless you have lots of RAM)
> has to be elsewhere.  On one machine, I have a little "throwaway" drive
> just for swap - which largely obviates the problems!  
>
> Another approach was to use a "RAM drive" for swap - I have 2 GB of
> normal RAM that is battery-backed that I use for this purpose.  This is
> only really possible on some motherboards that will take a lot of RAM!
>
> Chris
>
>
>   

Thanks Chris (& John).

Yeah I'm not sure mine will take much more RAM so I think I'll either
leave the swap on the SSD or dedicate a crappy old drive to it as you
suggest. Any idea how I might go about logging the number of IOs and how
much traffic there is to and from my swap partition for 24 hrs so I can
gauge how hard it would work its successor?

Thanks :)

Roger.

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