Re: OS X VM

[joeballo]

All of your points are well taken except, perhaps, the first. On the general principal of 'if things can wrong they will', i would just as lief not have a hard disk sitting there not doing anything productive except waiting to go bad and muck things up. I'd rather have it on a shelf in the closet. Of course if that were absolutely true I would be using a new imac and a single printer and not using globs of stuff sitting all over the office taking up space and running up my electric bill :-).

The only other point is that the 8 G boot partition limitation applies only to IDE drives as many of our obsolete machines, I admit it, are SCSI based. At the end of the day, my 8500 is rather less touchy about installations and the march of progress than my beige DT. As a matter of conditioning I feel more comfortable with SCSI disks than IDE but the price is certainly right. Of course as a server the 8500 just sort of sits there and quietly does its thing and doesn't get pounded on all the time.Alas, the office staff gets the new machines :-(.

I don't post on lists 'cause I like to keep a low profile. No problem rerouting it to the list. Neurotic, true, but at 62 I deserve a little neuroses, don't I [don't answer]. Off to eat turkey.


drjoe



On Thursday, November 28, 2002, at 12:06 PM, Liam Proven wrote:

And my comments...

If
you never see more than one or two swap files and if top does not show
appreciable page outs there is really no need to have a separate swap
partition.

While that's true as far as it goes, if you have your old SCSI disk
sitting there doing nothing, why not? Every little helps. Most of the time
it won't slow things down, and when it's needed, it may help.

I sometimes see folks installing their swap files on a
separate partition on the SAME physical drive as the OS X partition
which makes no sense at all since the spindle and heads cannot read
more than location at a time from the same physical disk.

Now, there are 2 different points in there.

The disk heads can't be in 2 places at once. True.

BUT keeping the VM files in a separate partition WILL:
- reduce fragmentation of the primary partition
- save space if you're stuck with an 8GB boot partition
- save the OS from searching the filesystem for the VM files

It may not give much performance boost, but it will help to prevent
performance /degrading/ over time.

If you are
going to use a separate swap partition it has to be on a physically
separate disk to make much sense.

Modify that to "to be optimal", I'd agree.

But arguably running OS X on obsolete kit doesn't make much sense, when
spending a bit more money would get much faster machines. Yet that's what
this list is about: getting the best you can from what you've got.

--
Liam Proven � http://welcome.to/liamsweb

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