Rod Butcher wrote:
Sluggers, I have 1 gig ram and 4 gig Swap on a Sata drive... performance when using memory-hogs like Sweep audio editor is great while it's using ram, but slows to a crawl once it starts using swap... not just Sweep but any app. Is this normal, or can I tune this in some way ? (I've spent my hardware budget for the next 3 years so no more ram).
1) Don't swap
It is slow, that's the nature of the beast.
2) Put it on a partition, not in a file.
You don't want the filesystem doing wierd performance-reducing stuff. Make sure you are using the most recent swap format.
3) Put the partition on fast disk
A disk of its own is good, since then the disk head movement from paging doesn't drop your application performance, and vice-versa.
Alternatively, a partition in the center of the disk, so the head never needs to move more than 0.5 of a disk.
4) Know the limits
I think the max swap partition size is 2GB, although you can have multiple. I can't see why you'd set up a smaller partition in this age of huge disks.
-- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
