Kay Roepke wrote: > > On Sunday, March 23, 2003, at 11:01 PM, Scott R. Godin wrote: > >> I'm very curious about how OS X works with swap partitions, as I've >> not seen >> it mentioned overmuch. I'm sure there's a reason linux preferentially >> uses >> a swap partition rather than using the main drive partitions. In fact, >> of >> every drive I've added to my Linux box, I've dedicated a small portion >> of >> it to swap memory. >> >> Can anyone point me to information regarding setting up a swap >> partition >> under OS X, and whether or not this is an installation option? (and if >> not, >> why not?) >> > > http://www.bombich.com/mactips/swap.html answers your swap partition > question. > > One of the reasons (at least one *I* could think of ;-)) for not using > a entire partition, is that > when you run out of swap space, you could just delete some files and be > done with it. Since darwin uses > 80 meg swapfiles giving the system more swap space is just a matter of > deleting some 80 megs. > With a swap partition you are SOL, since AFAIK darwin doesn't support > multiple places for swap files (such as > Linux does...simply add another swapfile on a different partition.) > Also, darwin will grow and shrink > the necessary amount of swap space as needed, thus will not block a > certain amount of diskspace. Very elegant.
Well, typically, swap space should reflect to a degree how much RAM you have in the system. (usually I see recommendations to have about as much dedicated swap as ram, or thereabouts) Chewing up your internal drive in order to fake out your system doesn't seem like an acceptable tradeoff to me. Having a dedicated swap partition makes more sense to me, as (particularly if you're using a small 2nd drive) you're not causing any fragmentation of the main drive this way. One odd thing in the article you cited, was that if I read this correctly, you're not able to specify the filesystem type 'swap' and must instead use hfs/ufs as the filesystem type, despite the fact that it's dedicated TO swapping entirely. Does OSX not support a 'swap' filesystem type in /etc/fstab ?
