On Monday 18 July 2005 15:12, Greg Wallace wrote:
While, the disk geometry is relevant, head movement is a very significant factor. Most home users are going to allocate 1 partition for swap and 1 partition for Linux. In this case, placing swap before the Linux partition might be better.
That was really the point I was trying to get across; i. e., that it does make a difference where you put swap. Linux defaults swap to the first partition and there is actually a reason for putting it there.
If your disk starts swapping so much that you can tell the difference between one location on the disk and another, it will be the least of your worries. Your system will be basically useless. Swap is good in three cases 1. An application uses so much memory that you need to go in to swap to be able to let it run. Some multimedia editing programs are like that. There, speed of swap is almost totally irrelevant 2. To make room for cache. The kernel will move parts of memory that haven't been accessed in a long time to swap, so that more internal memory can be used to cache disk accesses. The speed of the swap is again almost totally irrelevant 3. To store memory images when you suspend to disk. Here you will want to make sure you have enough swap available to fit your memory image. But the speed is relatively insignificant, since the access is on boot with nothing else running, there will be no massive seeking back and forth, and the relative difference in speed between inner and outer cylinders I seriously doubt will make much of an impact But swap used for the general running of the system? Forget it. If it gets that far, you might as well give up