On 05/03/15 00:12, Mark Rogers wrote:
On 4 March 2015 at 20:28, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
Swap space on SSD? Surely it's easier, quicker and faster to just shove more ram into the machine? RAM should be faster than SSD, and if you have enough of it, then swap space won't be used.
Most motherboards max out at 16GB RAM and I always find the O/S still finds some use for swap even if there's RAM available.
I'm *Very* surprised to hear this. It's not my experience.
I figure that if SSD is there it makes sense that if the O/S is going to swap at all it should swap to whatever is closest to RAM in speed, which is SSD.
You'd hope, but if you're saying that your O/S is using swap space when there's RAM free then I wouldn't bank on it! You know BTW that if you have multiple swap devices/files, you can set the priority of which gets used? I think you can do it with the swap or is it swapon command.
Incidentally, on my low-powered under-resourced craptop, lubuntu decided in its infinite wizdom to install compressed ram-based (pseudo-)swap space on "zram" drive. It seems to work well. That's higher priority than my actual swap partition, consequently the physical swap rarely gets used.
In an ideal world I'd have masses of RAM instead of SSD, but even then I'd want data written to disk in case of power failure, and loading apps etc still means pulling them from disk, so in that ideal world I'm going to want SSD as well. Given the limitations on expanding RAM I figure it's worth seeing how far I can get with SSD.
Either I'm going to see a huge performance increase or wonder why I bothered. I guess I'll know which soon enough!
I'm sure SSD will give you faster boot time and program loading time. It will work swap files/partitions faster than a regular HDD too. It'd be interesting to see comparisons of otherwise identical machines with/without more RAM or SSD, but I'm sure it'd be hard to manage a fair comparison. Let us know how fast things get.
Steve