[svlug] Partitioning problem

[Jeffrey Siegal]

On Feb 6, 2006, at 15:27 , Rick Moen wrote:

>> But if you still absolutely want to minimize swap seeking, use swap
>> files _inside_ your most active partitions.
>
> Interesting idea, but swap files have their own overhead.  And I  
> like to
> keep things simple, given a reasonable chance to do so.

I'm reasonably certain that on modern kernels the performance  
overhead of swap files is negligible (back around ~2.2 this was not  
the case).   In fact it wouldn't surprise me if the overhead due to  
seeking to a dedicated partition (regardless of its location) were   
far greater.  Of course, this wouldn't apply if the swap were on a  
dedicated (or mostly dedicated) drive.

But in any case all of these swap performance issues should not  
matter swap activity (and the impact of swap performance) on a  
properly configured system these days should be very low per previous  
comments.  It now generally makes sense to optimize swap  
configuration for reliability and administrator convenience rather  
than performance.