Or, actually, is it really important to have the swap on the fastest area of the hard drive?

It is most important to not need any swap at all because you have enough RAM

No seriously, if you are using swap so much that it matters where it is on the HD, you need some more RAM.

Mark

In other words, I can just put it wherever. Decent.

Put it either: On your fastest hard drive, on your least fragmented hard drive, split on two similar speed drives, or on the hard drive that you use the least.

If you tweak all you can, you might gain, say, 10-20% (a very optimistic guess. 2% is probably more accurate if we''re talking about different places on one disk) just by fiddling with the swap file.

But if you have enough ram to fit the program in, you can at the very least expect performance to increase by a factor 10.

This is only applicable when running something that currently requires lots (and I mean lots) of swapping.

So basically, swap is slooooow no matter what you do. Get enough ram to avoid swapping (512 or 768 is enough for all games I know of), and you can get huge improvements in performance.

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I didn''t even know hard disks had fast areas?

Least fragmented hard drive? Are you not using a swap partition? If your *nix doesn''t support it, fine, but Linux does, and I really recommend using one. If you''re worried about running out of space on it, remember that you can still make a second swap file in an existing filesystem, for use in emergencies.

fragmentation is irrelevant.

#1, swap partitions do not have fragmentation

#2, swap files do not grow or shrink, and therefore are not affected, and do not cause, fragmentation

Linux swap files don''t change in size, so they won''t *CAUSE* fragmentation, but they could still be fragmented to start with.

Mark

quote:

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Original post by Spoonster
...So basically, swap is slooooow no matter what you do. Get enough ram to avoid swapping (512 or 768 is enough for all games I know of)...

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Except for C&C Generals in multiplayer! Man, I have 512MB 400DDR RAM, but after a while the game starts having performance lock-ups, you know, it plays ok for 2 seconds and then... freeze for a second, then it goes for 2 seconds ... (even if I have all the game detail set on its lowest)



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quote:

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Original post by markr
Linux swap files don''t change in size, so they won''t *CAUSE* fragmentation, but they could still be fragmented to start with.

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But it''s unlikely, if you assume that a swap file is going to be created pretty soon after installation, before your filesystem has a chance to get fragmented.