There's also the memory dump thing. Personally, I tend to disable swap entirely. YMMV. On Sun, Mar 15, 2015 at 6:44 PM, Matt Graham wrote: > On 2015-03-15 18:13, Michael Havens wrote: > >> I was wondering why Linux uses a swap partition rather than a swap >> file. I mean I would think a swap file would be superior since a >> file's size can fluctuate whereas a partition is static. >> > > Historical reasons and performance. A partition is a contiguous area of > disk, while a file can be a widely-scattered area of blocks. The kernel > can also access a partition directly, while accessing a file incurs > unavoidable overhead of going through the filesystem kernel code. This > overhead is (almost) invisible in modern high-powered systems with many G > of RAM and CPUs >= 2 GHz. When 128M of RAM and 400 MHz of CPU were what > was available, people needed to be more concerned about performance. > > -- > Crow202 Blog: http://crow202.org/wordpress > There is no Darkness in Eternity > But only Light too dim for us to see. > --------------------------------------------------- > PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org > To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: > http://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss > -- James McPhee jmcphe@gmail.com