(summary) How swap space is allocated

From: jaysun@cs.clemson.edu
Date: Mon Jun 11 1990 - 10:25:46 CDT


The summary of my original post:

>If you have multiple swap spaces/files, how is it decided to
>use one or the other?? More specifically, if I have a local swap
>partition and want to add more through NFS does this slow swapping
>down to the speed of the NFS swap space or is swapper smart enough
>to only use the local swap intil the other is needed??

Summary of answer:
The best I can do for answering my question is that at least for BSD 4.3
and probably Sun also, swapping is interleaved throughout the swap
space. Swapper has no knowledge of where the swap space is so it
cannot pick and choose the fastest swap area to use. Therefore,
if part of your swap is local and part is over the network (NFS for example)
then the speed should be approx. proportional to the amount of swap
on each.

Thanks to:
holle@ASC.SLB.COM
michael.harris@East.Sun.COM
mcgrew@dartagnan.rutgers.edu
del@mlb.semi.harris.com
convex!datri@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu

                  
Jay Williamson Clemson University
Systems Manager Computer Science Dept.
jaysun@cs.clemson.edu South Palmetto Blvd.
(803) 656-5884 29634-1906



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:05:57 CDT