Clayton, On Tuesday 18 October 2005 06:17, Clayton wrote:
Do you have unused space? Otherwise you'll have to resize another partiton
No unpartitoned space. When I set up this system I assumed the 1GB RAM and 1GB swap would be enough, so the rest of the drive got allocated. That said, the Reiser partition is not full.
Current config is: /dev/sda1 = swap /dev/sda2 = / (33% full) (I didn't do a separate /home partition, although I'm wishing I had now)
You should at least consider swapping to a file. It works well enough if the file used is contiguous. That's easily accomplished when the file system is new, much harder later on. It also depends on the file system type you use. For a while I was swapping to a file on an XFS file system, and it worked fine. You should also consider getting more RAM. Unless you're running a lot of processes that mostly sit idle and can be moved to swap without adversely affecting performance, actually using your swap space is what's called "thrashing." If the so-called working set (the amount of RAM being actively referenced by running processes, not just allocated to them but remaining unaccessed) is larger than RAM, no amount of swap will make the system usable.
...
second swap wouldn't seem to be too hard either. Is having 2 swaps equivalent to the size of one more or less a wash performance wise?
That's a good question... what is performance like if I squeeze down /dev/sda2 and add a new swap partition at /dev/sda3?
Again, you should not be concerned about performance of swap, 'cause if you're actively using it, you're going to have very bad system performance. In fact, it is by far the most common way to bring a Linux system down: get it to swap or page excessively. Once the X server starts getting paged out, you're done for.
C.
Randall Schulz