| Stephen Gran on 19 Dec 2007 17:20:39 -0800 |
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On Wed, Dec 19, 2007 at 03:19:15PM -0500, Jeff McAdams said: > Walt Mankowski wrote: > > > I always thought the main advantage of swap partitions over swap files > > was speed. All the bytes in a partition are continuous, so access > > time is slightly higher than for a file created with dd, which can be > > scattered over the disk. > > There is that, there is also that it doesn't have to go through so much > of the other sorts of processing in the kernel. VFS, perhaps LVM, > filesystem code, et al. The hit here is pretty minor, but there is a bit. The hit at this point is (almost) a pointer dereference per abstraction layer, so very minimal. That being said, Walt's point about scattering of a file over the disk vs. ordered layout for a partition is accurate - you can't do all that much to optimize scattered data. -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Stephen Gran | A lifetime isn't nearly long enough to | | steve@lobefin.net | figure out what it's all about. | | http://www.lobefin.net/~steve | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Attachment:
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