if you make multiple swap partitions, it will automagically "raid" across both/all partitions. so you'd get no real benifit of having more than one on the same drive (should be slower too, if on the same drive.) With 96 meg, you likely wont use swap much. If you talk to "Andre, the IDE Guy", he'll tell you how much swap sucks, and that you shouldnt even have one. I completely disaggree. Yes, running out of swap does suck, but its a hella lot better then having the kernel try to rapidly flush file buffers while trying to load netscape. If your like most of us, you have enough RAM to do your day-to-day stuff, and 99% of the time wont use swap. in such cases, i reccomend making a small swap FILE. Yes, the file is slower than a raw swap partition, but who cares?..its only there for the >1% of the time you hit swap. even if its small, (like 32 or 64 meg), when the time comes that you start hitting swap, you'll have enough room to comfortably flush the buffers and get stuff back into RAM and off the swap. a clever chap, might even write a small daemon to monitor the free RAM, and add and remove the swap file whenever you get 'close' to useing up all your ram. in theory, you could keep adding these swaps dynamically and maybe never run out of ram (till you hit the limit on VM, and i have no idea what that is). anyway, to create a swapfile: dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap bs=1000k count=64 mkswap /swap swapon /swap to add this to your fstab, so it will be there next time you reboot: /swap swap swap defaults 0 0 Have fun, -- ======================================================================== Rocky McGaugh Atipa Linux Solutions Linux Systems Engineer www.atipa.com rocky@smluc.org rmcgaugh@atipa.com ======================================================================== On Wed, 5 Jan 2000, Mark Schaefer wrote:

My questions are .. .. 1) Does it actually help to have more than one swap partition ? 2) If yes then how many for a machine with 96MB Ram ? 3) Should I put them on diferent Hard Disks ?

4) Is it possible to add another swap partition to an existing installation without starting again at the begining. I know I can use FIPS to make some space but how do I then format the new partition as swap and let Linux know that it is there and ready for use.

Finally.. .. Being a newbie I expected to see my current swap partition in my /etc/fstab file but it isn't there - which file keeps that info?

Hope you guys will help.

BFN

Mark

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