Swap Optimization

[Jason Joines]

On Thursday 28 March 2002 10:37 am, Myles Green wrote:
> On Thu, 28 Mar 2002 10:18:42 -0600
>
> Jason Joines <joines at joines.bus.okstate.edu> wrote:
> >      Which would result in better performance?
> >
> > 1.  Swap on partition 1 of ATA 100 drive on ATA 133 controller with
> > OS on partition 2 of same drive.
> >
> > 2.  Swap on only partition of ATA 33 drive on ATA 100 controller
> > with OS on partition 1 of ATA 100 drive on ATA 133 controller.
>
> If you place your swap on it's own drive, on it's own channel, you
> will get the best performance. Do you really have that many drives
> requiring two IDE controler cards?

On Thursday 28 March 2002 10:29 am, Net Llama wrote:
> --- Jason Joines <joines at joines.bus.okstate.edu> wrote:
> >      Which would result in better performance?
> >
> > 1.  Swap on partition 1 of ATA 100 drive on ATA 133 controller with
> > OS
> >
> > on partition 2 of same drive.
> >
> > 2.  Swap on only partition of ATA 33 drive on ATA 100 controller
> > with OS
> > on partition 1 of ATA 100 drive on ATA 133 controller.
>
> There's a lot more to consider here than just the location of your
> partitions and the type of controller that the device uses.
>
> For starters, how much physical memory do you have?  What kind of
> physical memory do you have?  What is the box going to be used for?
> There's always a possibility that your swap partition may never be
> used at all, depending on these other factors.  Realistically, if
> you're this concerned about disk performance, you should be using
> SCSI hardware, not IDE.
>
> =====
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Lonni J. Friedman                     netllama at linux-sxs.org


     Mainly I was just curious as to whether the fact that the drive was 
on a separate contorller would override the fact that it is a slower 
ATA-33 drive.

     I do have that many drives requiring that many controllers.  The 
motherboard has 2 ATA-100 controllers and 2 ATA-133/RAID controllers.  
In addition, there are two add on ATA-100/RAID cards with four 
controllers each.

     The machine is being used to do backups over a couple of 100 Mbit 
networks using multiple NICs..  I have a bunch of 80 GB ATA/100 drives 
in removable drive carriers.  The two adaptec cards are used to keep 2 
four drive raid 5 arrays.  Weekly and Monthly backups are written to 
this.  The onboard raid is used for the OS, and daily backups.  It is 
configured as a mirrored raid with a small partition for the OS and the 
rest for the dailies.  I have 1 GB of DDR RAM.
 
     We used IDE because it is much less expensive than SCSI and much 
better performance than tape.

     I ended up with an extra bay in the case and unused spots on the 
controllers so I just thought it might help to throw an extra drive in 
dedicated to swap.


Jason Joines
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