[GRLUG] Solid State Drives

[Tim Schmidt]

On Sat, Nov 29, 2008 at 3:54 PM, Rob Steenwyk <rsteenwyk at gmail.com> wrote:
> You should always have a little bit of swap space, I remember reading a few
> Slashdot stories about it. OS'es just run better with a small swap partition
> there, but upgrading the RAM so that it doesn't use the swap nearly as much
> is a good idea.

Quite true.  There are always pages (in ram) of cruft that must be
there, but will either never or nearly never be accessed.  Getting it
out of ram and onto disk frees up those pages for use by more actively
accessed information, or just more file caching.  Either way, having a
swap file _always_ increases performance.  The question is by how
much.

A desktop with even a Gb or two of ram can benefit quite a bit from a
swap partition (especially if you have long-running, infrequently
accessed processes - like a couple firefox windows with a lot of tabs
open).

On the other hand, we have a machine here with 32Gb ram that doesn't
benefit much from a swap partition.  It still has one, and uses it,
but only for said crufty pages.  As I look at it right now, it's using
140kb of swap.  35 pages.  Seems tiny and insignificant compared to
32Gb...  until you need it.

--tim