[GRLUG] swap benchmarking

[Michael Mol]

Does anyone know of a tool useful for benchmarking swap performance?
I'd like to play around with using a USB flash device for swap, to see
how it could improve system performance in systems without gobs of
RAM. (Indeed, if the performance gain is great enough, it could delay,
or even obviate, the need to upgrade system memory in systems where
such upgrades are expensive and bandwidth requirements aren't great.)

Now that Vista supports this, I've heard from a couple people who've
personally tried it on their Windows machines.  They tell me it's
improved their system performance.

Linux has been capable of doing this since USB Mass Storage support
was added to the 2.4 kernel.  With USB 2.0, the link throughput
performance has been there, but took the massive demand of MP3 players
to bring flash prices low enough to make it worth the cost.  So it's
certainly something that can be tried by any Linux user made aware of
fstab, mkswap and "swapon/swapoff".

-- 
:wq