[ale] On swap space (was Re: who is eating my drive)

[Pat Regan]

On Tue, 31 May 2011 16:05:47 -0400
The Don Lachlan <ale-at-ale.org at unpopularminds.org> wrote:

> I can think of no reasons you would deliberately put a primary
> partition behind the extended partition.

The most likely time for it to happen is if you run out of primary
partitions and you want to split one of the earlier ones up into two
(or more) partitions.  I'm sure someone has done that before :)

> Regular paging between physical RAM and swap space can be expensive
> to a system's performance; I would say that we shouldn't be paging
> in/out often, if at all, but paging out is A Good Thing <tm>.

If a system is accessing swap often enough that the speed of the swap
space makes a significant difference then it is most likely time for a
memory upgrade.  That's all I'm trying to point out :)

> I would also counter that I have never, EVER, seen anyone
> deliberately use the start of a disk for faster access unless they
> were using it for swap. If you want to put your most I/O intensive
> partition at the front of the disk, that absolutely makes sense - and
> as soon as I find someone who does that, I'll toggle my bit to 1. :)

There's a good chance you've inadvertently done exactly this on your
own systems.  Anyone creating smallish root/var partitions near the
front of the drive are speeding up access to some of the most important
files on the system.  :)

Pat