Re: [gentoo-user] Swap performance

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

Apparently, though unproven, at 18:53 on Wednesday 25 May 2011, Volker Armin 
Hemmann did opine thusly:

> On Wednesday 25 May 2011 16:20:58 Alex Schuster wrote:
> > So, 27 minutes to put 885MB of swap back into RAM, with the double amount
> > of that being free RAM.  I monitored with iotop, and the transfer rate
> > started around 60-100 K/s, later it went higher. But the average
> > transfer rate is 550K/s. Shouldn't swap be, like, a little faster?
> 
> no, sounds about right. Swap in linux is brain damaging slow. If you think
> about it your gall bladder might explode. That slow.

For years now I've considered only two possible uses for linux swap:

- a teeny small one just for wiggle room to try and hold that POS called the 
oom killer at bay

- a bigger one the same size as total RAM, as a place to put the suspend image


Every other usage makes no sense at all (RAM being so cheap and all). In fact, 
I've banned swap on all company servers except databases.

I'd be interested to hear any current use cases where swap delivers a provable 
benefit.

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com