change swapfile

[eddski]

i just added an additional drive to my desktop and wanted to put the swapfile on it in hopes of getting better performance, but i don't know how to do that or if its possible. can it be done and will it increase performance?

[oldos2er]

No, hard disk access is many orders of magnitude slower than RAM access, so swapping will degrade performance, not enhance it. Max out your RAM first.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq

[gdonwallace]

Its more of a swap partition as opposed to a swap file.

The swap partition is going to be slower than memory anyway. But if you wanted to do it, you would have to format the drive as a swap partition, then disable and reformat the existing swap partition into usable space.

[andrew.46]

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq

Nice page. My own situation is this one:

High RAM and high disk space With 2 GB RAM and 100 GB hard disk, use 2 GB for swap since hard disk space is plentiful.

although the disk is actually 300 GB. I have attempted to max out the ram + swap file several times, with conky watching, and it is very difficult to even make the swap file kick up to anywhere near the 1 gig mark . But of course the golden rule is max out the physical ram....

[eddski]

thanks for your comments, will max out ram