Apparently, though unproven, at 18:58 on Wednesday 25 May 2011, Volker Armin Hemmann did opine thusly:
> On Wednesday 25 May 2011 10:31:19 Paul Hartman wrote: > > When I move the swap to a slow SD card instead (2MB/sec transfer > > rate), even in that slow device, swapoff on the eMMC swap partition > > with ~500M in-use takes about 2 or 3 minutes at most with the data > > being swapped slowly into the SD card. > > > > So I think in your case it should be much faster than that! > > you are comparing apples with oranges (harddisks with moving arms with > solid state devices). > > Do yourself a favour. Look up how long a harddisk needs to position its > head. > > Now you can calculate how many times a second a harddisk can position its > head. > > Now remember: swap is stupid, so lots and lots of head movement needed (and > a cash flush is running too - so even more movements to write all that > crap to disk), > > The result: the whole mess is fscking slow. > > You can have a nice fat raid with nice and fast harddisks - if you try to > stream to a 15 year old DLT drive with 5/10mb/sec speed the dlt drive will > constantly rewind - because harddisks suck when they have to seek. And swap > (just like a backup) = lots and lots and lots of seeks. That reminds me of how SSDs ought to be much faster than hard disks. But every time I use my Acer netbook (8G SSD) I curse and swear and commit random acts of violence - that first gen SSD controller is the worst possible thing to ever hit computers. I swear the 4G SDHC expansion card is leaps faster.... (completely OT, I know. I'll keep quiet now.) -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
