Operating Systems > Linux and UNIX

WHats your Swap Size?

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Master of Reality:
i got 250 MB of swap 128 SDRAM. My swap is on a harddrive beside only the boot partition, my root is on a separate drive.

voidmain:

quote:Originally posted by The Master of Reality / B0B:
i got 250 MB of swap 128 SDRAM. My swap is on a harddrive beside only the boot partition, my root is on a separate drive.
--- End quote ---


Having the swap on the least utilized drive would be best as you have it. I'm not sure if spreading the swap out across a utilized drive and a non-utilized drive would increase or decrease the performance. I guess it would depend on how utilized the drive is, but I am not sure of the logic that the kernel uses. I believe it to be much like RAID striping if using more than one swap partition at the same priority, but not sure.

voidmain:
I found an interesting thread that doesn't really relate to spreading swap out across multiple partitions but it discusses swap in general and also brings in another important term "thrashing". It's an interesting debate/argument (it's a large thread):

Swap vs No Swap

In a couple of the messages the term "thrashing" was brought up. I forgot about this important issue when it comes to swapping. Your RAM isn't only used for program code but also for caching program data and files. Less used code and data are paged out to your swap partition to make more room for caching (to increase performance). Generally it's good to have a fair amount of swap space so that the kernel can page out less used program data to make room in fast RAM for caching more utilized code/data.

Thrashing occurs if your swap partition is on the same drive as your "/" partition (or working partitions).  Basically you want your swap space on a dedicated or low utilized drive. The reason for this is because you may be doing heavy I/O on your "/" partition that would trigger a lot of swap/paging activity. Well, when this happens your  disk heads are going to be switching back and forth between your "/" partition and your swap partition very frequently. This can cause the system to come to a crawl (I would expect the farther apart the partitions are the slower the system would be).

So optimally you would want your swap on a low utilized disk (the disk heads can stay in pretty much the same spot). So m0r, you have your swap set up in a good way. It would be even better if you had several low utilized disks that you can spread the swap out over that would allow the kernel to stripe and increase performance even more. I would guess that in the case of only having two disks you would only want the swap on the least utilized disk as to prevent the thrashing scenerio.

Bazoukas:
Oh oh this cant be good  :(

My second HD which is the exact same size, brand and speed with my Master HD, does a


vzououououm,,,chaklan,,,,chaklan chaklan vzouououou, chaclan noise.!

 Am gonna take it out. This can only mean trouble.
  then again that HD was the HD that I always installed windos.

voidmain:
Yeah, clanking sounds coming from a hard drive are never good in my experience. They turn into a paper weight fast and in a hurry.

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