How much swap on laptop?

[Les]

On Wed, 2006-12-13 at 10:54 +1030, Tim wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-12-12 at 14:36 +0200, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> > I've heard that the swap should be as close to the center of the disk
> > as possible- does that mean that I should use hda1 as swap?
> 
> I've heard people say that commonly accessed drive space should be
> there, others saying the difference is marginal at best.  Whether doing
> so as hda1 achieves it would depend on the size of all partitions that
> you configure.  You'd have to work out were the middle of your drive is
> based on the sizing, not just the numbering, of the partitions.
> 
> -- 
> (Currently testing FC5, but still running FC4, if that's important.)
> 
> Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.
> I read messages from the public lists.
> 
On some disks, sectors are added as the diameter increases.  At least I
should say, they used to.  Today most disks write to a small band of the
overall disk, so I don't know if any of them do dynamic sectors based on
track location.  However the speed difference was minimal anyway, since
all tracks rotate at the same speed.  In fact, you could argue that in
the dynamically sectored disks, having the swap at the outer segments
would be faster since more data storage would exist without moving the
head ( a time consuming process).

On trick I have done on heavy processing tasks is to put swap on a
totally separate drive.  Thus the seeks were swap relative and required
less access time.  In some cases this can provide dramatic increases in
through put.  Also having a separate disk for tmp will provide you with
some benefits depending on the type of software you are using.  But
again, YMMV.

Today, if you wish to "tune" your system, you have to look at the
overall task, the requirements and the architecture that addresses those
requirements.  For general use (not intensive scientific computation or
heavy duty 3d graphics manipulation) you will not see much difference
with an OOB (out of the box) PC and Linux or Windows setup.  But if you
are heavy into MMRPG's or VR, or scientific array manipulation or high
level visualization (graphics), the picture changes, but then so does
the level of personal knowledge and software analysis that is needed to
make it all play nicely.

Regards,
Les H