Subj : Re: RAID 0 swap useless for performance - is this true?
To   : comp.os.linux
From : Eric
Date : Wed Oct 27 2004 06:49 am

Brendan S (Scratch User) wrote:

> I was considering running my swap as RAID 0 for performance reasons, but I
> found this article:
>
http://www.ostenfeld.dk/~jakob/Software-RAID.HOWTO/Software-RAID.HOWTO-2.html
> 
> Which says that the kernel automatically stripes swap partitions.
> 
> Is this true?  Can anyone point me at any other references?
> 
> Thanks in advance
> 
> Brendan
One thing you might consider, its been my experience that Linux does very
little swapping unless you really are low on memory. It seems that with
about 512meg or so that the swap file is used very little and not very
often. Of course your habits may be different and you might have a lot of
memory intensive stuff going at once, i dont know. but Linux isnt like
windows where windows seems to be constantly swapping things in and out.
My point in all this is that no matter what you do to the swap it aint 
gonna do a whole lot to improve performance. (assuming its adequate size 
to begin with that is). If you want performance,(baring a system upgrade)
make sure you have enough ram, then (if your running a gui) turn to your
video card, then your mass storage. The reason i put mass storage last is
that today its actually quite good and there isnt a lot of disk activity
going on. Watch your disk light, most of the time its off. 
Thats my 2 cents
Eric

.