Re: [LUG] Gparted questions

On 18 October 2013 16:26, Gordon Henderson <gordon+lug@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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).

<snip>

Excellent advice and history. I was also taught about swap and head movements and disk optimisation. That was for 5.25" full height 10MB MFM/RLL drives that had some serious head inertia to overcome.

I think it stopped being important around the time 3.5" hdd's reached 500gb and ram got over 1gb commonly.

It's an anachronism that should stop being the default in many distros (even debian left to its own devices still creates a swap partition).

A swapfile - sure. IMO linux is generally smart enough on its defaults to swap out unused things and use the spare ram for something more useful like caching, more or less so you don't need to worry about it in most cases. Definitely don't need to worry about it in desktops and even solo servers - when you get onto high demand servers and clustering, well, yeah, it could get important there. But if you're adminning at that level, you already know this stuff enough to make informed choices and this won't be the first bit of tweaking you'll be doing anyway :)

Good tip about hibernating. Hadn't come across that before.