swap file

[Eric "Shubes"]

If you had more ram, you wouldn't be swapping in the first place!

Kind of like expanding your garage to hold your tool shed? (That's the
closest I can come to an analogy, admittedly not a good one)

keith smith wrote:
> Isn't flash more expensive than RAM?  So why not just add 512M RAM and
> run  your swap in ram?
> 
> Keith
> 
> */"Jon M. Hanson" <jon at the-hansons-az.net>/* wrote:
> 
>     Michael Havens wrote:
>     > I had a stroke of genius! (you are going to be proud of me for
>     thinking of
>     > this). This idea has been mulling around in my head for a while
>     now. Wouldn't
>     > it be lightning quick to put a swap file on a pendrive? No disk
>     activity
>     > would be needed at all! It would all have to do with the bus's speed.
>     >
>     > Okay, I looked into doing this a while ago and was wondering if
>     things had
>     > changed.
>     > -1- touch
>     > -2- mkswap
>     > -3- swapon (max file size in bytes>
>     > -4- add ' swap swap noauto 0 0' to /etc/fstab
>     >
>     > what are the drawbacks to doing this? how could I automate this?
>     >
>     >
>     > man! why do most computers even have hard drives! Unless you are
>     running a
>     > business.....
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>     The problem is that flash drives are fast at reading but an order of
>     magnitude slower at writing. Also flash drive cells have a limited
>     number of write cycles before they go bad. Some flash drives are smart
>     so that they rotate around where they write to even out which cells are
>     written to but they will eventually go bad and the size of your flash
>     drive will slowly shrink.
>     Microsoft Vista has a similar feature where you can plug in a flash
>     drive and it extends memory. I would think it would mean swap space
>     since even though flash drives are fast for reading they are no where
>     near the speed of the memory on the front-side bus.
> 
> 
>     -- 
>     Jon M. Hanson (N7ZVJ)
>     Homepage: http://the-hansons-az.net
>     Weblog: http://the-hansons-az.net/wordpress
>     Jabber IM: jon at the-hansons-az.net
> 
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-- 
-Eric 'shubes'