On Mon, 17 Apr 2000 14:57:32 -0500, Jeramia Ory <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
> One cause of a performance hit is when you swap memory in and out
>of the partition. In a single drive system, even thought the swap is
>on a separate partition, it can't access two partitions on the same
>drive at the same time, so you lose performance while the drive
>alternates the memory swapping process and the other disk i/o
>processes. With the swap on a seperate channel, the system can now
>do memory swapping concurrently with the other processes, thereby
>speeding up i/o.
You also have issues with sending the poor little cylinder head
all over the drive. Ideally, you'd have your swap partition on a
drive all by itself (which is impractical because nobody needs that
much swap) or on a drive with infrequently accessed data; then the
head on the swap drive will be always be near the swap data. It's
also a good idea to put your swap partitions near the center of the
disk.
My system has /, /tmp, /usr/lib and swap on hda, and everything else
(including a secondary swap) on hdc. hdd is a CD-ROM; there is
nothing on hdb. This is not ideal, but I'm constrained by relatively
limited disk space (roughly 6GB).
Understanding the I/O subsystem of your computer is critical to
optimizing its operation. :)
Kelly
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