[WYLUG-help] "lost" hdd

[John Hodrien]

On Sun, 29 Jan 2006, Dave Fisher wrote:

> I'm not sure of the situation with current filesystems and disk
> hardware, but historically, dedicated swap partitions performed much
> better than swap _files_ (i.e. files stored on a normal filesystem).

AFAIK in the past you couldn't even have a swap file.  I don't think there's a
performance difference anymore, since I was under the impression that a swap
file still had to be contiguous on disk.  Stick with a swap partition, as
beardies will consider you normal.

> Actually, there is a performance case for having 2 swap partitions (one
> on each disk), but given your unfamiliarity with /etc/fstab I didn't
> think it wise to recommend the slightly trickier configuration required
> to use a second swap partition efficiently.

I'd never consider swap as having any performance.  Apart from the value of
swapping out bits that effectively never get used, you never actually *want*
to use swap.

> If you wanted to maximise your future options, you could always 'waste'
> 1GB by creating a swap partition (/dev/hdb2) of that size on /dev/hdb
> now, then optimise its use later, when you've understood how /etc/fstab
> works.
>
> In particular, you probably need to know about how to correctly set swap
> priorities in /etc/fstab in order to maximise performance.

It's just not worth it.  If you're optimising swap, you've got freaky
requirements, and you're by no means a normal user.

jh

-- 
"Woman was God's second mistake."                    -- Nietzsche