How much swap?

[James Wilkinson]

Martin Marques wrote:
> Is there any performace issues related to using swap files instead of a swap 
> partition?

I understand that these days, there isn't. In any case, when you're
swapping to disk, what really kills performance is the relative eternity
it takes for data to reach disk or be read from disk. For paging, what
will usually take the most time is moving the drive head to reach the
right track, and then for the disk to spin so the right bit of data is
underneath the head.

Depending on how you lay things out, a swap file that's physically close
on disk to the rest of the files you're accessing may well be faster
than a swap partition at one end of the disk because the drive head can
get to the right track faster.

Hope this helps,

James.
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