Swap Optimization

[Net Llama]

--- Jason Joines <joines at joines.bus.okstate.edu> wrote:
>      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.

But do you even need it?  Why waste a drive on more swap space if you're
not going to need it?  What does 'free' look like after the box has been
up for a few days?  Unless you're actually using (up all) the swap you
have, adding more won't have any efffect whatsoever.

If all this box is used for is backup, then i can't see how its going to
be memory intensive, as most of the load is on disk I/O, not memory
usage.  

BTW, there's a reason why IDE is so much cheaper than SCSI, and its not
just to make people rich.

=====
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lonni J. Friedman                     netllama at linux-sxs.org

Linux Step-by-step help:           http://netllama.ipfox.com

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