From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Oct 13 12:55:46 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from pau-amma.whistle.com (pau-amma.whistle.com [207.76.205.64]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 55B9514A04 for ; Wed, 13 Oct 1999 12:55:44 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dhw@whistle.com) Received: (from dhw@localhost) by pau-amma.whistle.com (8.9.2/8.9.2) id MAA32322; Wed, 13 Oct 1999 12:55:33 -0700 (PDT) Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 12:55:33 -0700 (PDT) From: David Wolfskill Message-Id: <199910131955.MAA32322@pau-amma.whistle.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, mpoulin@honk.org Subject: Re: SV: Disks...? In-Reply-To: Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG >Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 15:45:13 -0400 (EDT) >From: Marty Poulin >To: freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG [Redirected to -questions. dhw] >I've been wondering for the last little while whether it would be >beneficial to assign the swap partition to a separate disk - has anyone >tried this? If so, how did you find it affected system performance? >Common sense tells me that it would speed the system up, >especially if the swap disk is on a separate controller, >but common sense has been known to lie to me in the past. Putting (some) swap on a relatively inactive spindle is generally a Good Thing. It is not necessary for swap placement to be all-or-nothing; you can have multiple swap areas. (Having more than one on a single spindle isn't generally something I'd recommend, though.) And it's my understanding that swap use migrates toward swap areas that yield better peformance. Of course, best is to avoid swapping atogether, but that's true for I/O generally -- it's faster if you can figure out ways to avoid it. If you have an MFS-mounted file system (such as /tmp), I'm not sure which swap areas would be used in FreeBSD; in SunOS, my recollection is that it just treats the entire set of swap areas as a single resource as far as TMPFS is concerned. Cheers, david -- David Wolfskill dhw@whistle.com UNIX System Administrator voice: (650) 577-7158 pager: (888) 347-0197 FAX: (650) 372-5915 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message