swapfiles and speed

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: swapfiles and speed
started by: lovdsl

Posted by lovdsl on Mar. 02 2006,09:08

Not sure where this topic goes..I have dsl installed non frugal to a 420mg hd with a 50mg swapfile on a.dx2 66mhz and 48mg ram.vintage equipment but dsl is running well just slow..would increaseing the swap file increase the speed?..would swap on a second drive increase speed..can I have the 50 on primary + 100mg swap on a second drive..if it will increase speed..how do I get dsl to accept the second drive..when I turn on the drive in the bios and boot dsl hangs at booting the kernal..when I installed it gave some repeating error for hdc..which is why I turned it off..any help would be appreciated naturally.thanks..would like to add the second drive for swap without reinstall but only because I still need to backup the downloaded dsl extensions on the primary..could then reinstall...thanks

Posted by skaos on Mar. 02 2006,11:05

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..would increaseing the swap file increase the speed?

Probably not. I think your bottleneck is the processor and maybe to a lesser degree, the memory.

Quote

..would swap on a second drive increase speed.

If you use this second drive only for swap, it could be faster. There is always some disk activity - writing to log files, opening programs and user files, etc. - and this necessitates HD head movement and this movement is slow. Constantly moving the head between the swap partition and the linux partition will slow things down.

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..when I turn on the drive in the bios and boot dsl hangs at booting the kernal

Did you check the master/slave jumpers - if there is a CD drive on the secondary channel this may be the explanation.

Posted by lovdsl on Mar. 03 2006,05:54

Thanks very much for the response...the primary and cd are on ide1 and the second drive is on ide2..the drive was set to master as it is the secondary master what I did notice thanks to your prompting me to double check is that this old hd has 8 jumpers on the end of the drive..never used before..I ran through them and found the last of them allowed dsl to boot and recognize the drive..I turned it on via the root command button with swapon -a /dev/hdc1 and turned off the 50 meg swap on the primary.

.I would like to store some files on the 50 meg partition on the primary so I can reinstall at will..I can switch it to a reg part and mkfs but wonder
..how to copy the files and access.
..is this done at a comand line level? what are the commands?
.thanks again...and any additional thoughts appreciated.

Posted by lovdsl on Mar. 04 2006,01:24

A little premature on that..when I rebooted it lost the drive and hung at boot the kernal..turfed the drive and added a 260..made drive1 420m boot, on ide1 w/cd. drive2 hdc1,130m linux, hdc2 130m swap, on ide2..
mke2fs on hda1 and hdc1 and mount turn on swap and reinstall..the drive is detected and swap used but how do I access the partition on the second drive..I see I can click on the thing and change mount/unmount on both..file manager will not accept cd / or mkdir /..need help..will try to do some reading here in the forum but scan takes a while...thanks for any input..as always greatly appreciated..

will add some here..when reboot the drive is not mounted..click desktop button..mounted
go to emelfm as superuser..bookmarks..mnt..hdc1..open..see lost and found..so mkdir..copy some random files..drive space altered..reboot..same files there..BLAST YOU SUPERUSER.