On Thu, Nov 22, 2007 at 10:55:07AM -0600, Robert Citek wrote: > > For many of the machines at ByteWorks, including the classroom machines > and the EAC student machines, I've configured them to use a swapfile > instead of a swap partition. This greatly simplifies maintenance of the > machine and cloning of the disks. However, I've been wondering if there > was any performance penalty for using a swapfile instead of a swap > partition. After doing a few tests, I came to the conclusion that a > swapfile is no worse than using a swap partition. In fact, according to > the tests I did, using a swapfile is about 20% faster than using a swap > partition. > > For more details: > > http://groups.google.com/group/cwelug/msg/2c384970d73029df
That's really interesting, Robert. I did some web searching on this because I'd previously read that swap partitions offered more security than swap files, but I can't seem to find any information on this now. I did find that the speed improvement for swap files vs. swap partitions appears to be a 2.6 kernel improvement: http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/5/29/3 http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/7/7/326 Some people suggest swap partitions may be useful if you dual or triple boot since you can use the same partition for multi-booting Linux operating systems: http://www.go2linux.org/swap-file-vs-swap-partition Thanks for sharing your experiment. sean -- Sat, 24 Nov 2007 20:31:40 -0600
