swap

[James Mcphee]

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 <mhgraham at crow202.org> 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.
>
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-- 
James McPhee
jmcphe at gmail.com
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