Hi,
I heard that actually soft-raid for Linux can't swap over a /dev/md*
device.
Someone suggests that putting enough RAM into a box, can avoid swapping,
but I think it is safe to have some swap space, in the case a process
eats up much
memory for short time, to prevent that pages of executable programs are
trashed over and over ,
which degrades performance seriously.
I've seen this on my P133 with 64MB running X11 at 16bpp plus a Netscape
4.07 with 20 open
browser windows. (displaying large GIFs)
If I disable swap space, then at some point the system slows down very
much.
If I leave the swaparea enabled, the system uses 5-10MB of the swaparea,
and netscape feels much smooter, but there are very little swapping
activity on the disk.
I don't know how much slower it is to swap do a regular file instead
using the raw partition,
but I think for soft-raid setups, if one want to protect the swaparea
with RAID,
then the easiest way to do this, is to make a /swapfile ,with dd ,
run mkswap and swapon,
and adding a line in fstab.
any comments / suggestions ?
regards,
Benno.
