[PLUG] Position of swap partition

Rich Shepard rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Wed Oct 27 19:57:50 UTC 2010


On Wed, 27 Oct 2010, Jason Barnett wrote:

> I would vote for option 3.
> /dev/sda1 = /
> /dev/sda2 = /tmp
> /dev/sda3 = swap
>
> My thinking is that the root partition is the most frequently used and you
> want it in the fastest part of the drive.  The /tmp directory is used
> frequently so you want that in the second fastest part of the drive.
> Lastly, you should hope to never need to use the swap partition except for
> hibernation so put it in the slowest part of the drive.

Jason,

   I was thinking of that and that with 4G RAM the swap partition may not be
used that frequently.

> Two other points...
> 1) Where are you mounting your /home partition?

   In /, no longer a separate partition.

> 2) You might want to think about forgoing the swap partition but create a
> swap file on the / folder.  This is usually a bit slower, but being in a
> faster area of the drive and the flexability it gives you might be worth
> the tradeoff.  Besides, if you find space getting tight in your / folder,
> you can just remove the swapfile if you find you are not using it, to get
> a bit of emergency breathing room.

   It's a 500G/7200RPM SATA2 drive. I currently have 138G of files on the
older 160G drive so I doubt that I'll be running out of room any time soon.

   What prompted my thinking about moving swap was always before booting from
hda1; this would make it sda2 and while it probably makes no difference, it
would mean I might inadvertently screw things up some time in the future.

Thanks to all of you for responding,

Rich



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