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On Fri, 18 Oct 2013, Eion MacDonald wrote:
A minor point, I usually always make a SWAP partition at end of hard disc and then set for each distro at least one root and sometimes a root and a home (with different names example homeUb homeSuse) two partitions this seems to work so easy to change disto by new install to partition with old root / after reformating it to chosen file system.
In ye olden days, a swap partition iwas a good thing, and its location on disk was almost always selected to minimise head movement - so putting it at the "end" of the disk was always a bad thing...
In these new enlightneed days, no-one appears to give a toss about disk efficiency. Yet another bit of lore lost to the yoof of today )-:
Disks were partitioned for a number of reasons - one was for efficiency - put the users home directories in the middle, or put the programs in the middle and swap not far away - having /usr, swap, /home next to each other in that order wasn't unusual - it was all about minimising head movement (because that takes more time than anything else).
If you're running different distros then it makes sense to share the swap partiton (and for it to be a partition!) just to same disk space, but do be aware that if one distro hibernates then it will store data in swap which will be corrupted when another dsitro boots (so don't hibernate)
Otherwise just use a swapfile and forget about using a partition - it's not less (or more) efficient than a swap partition in all respects (other than head movement)
SSDs make a mockery of all that anyway.And swap partition/file size - it's been a decade or so since "double ram" was a neccessity. A little can be a good thing, even with lots of RAM in your PC as it might help little used programs be swapped out, leaving more RAM for buffers, etc. but then you'll need to tune "swapiness" becaose some people think otherwise and some distros default to the wrong value (for some value of wrong)
Really, if you have 4GB of RAM on a "normal"" desktop just forget about swap.
Gordon
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