Re: Ext2-fs panic
Richard Gooch (rgooch@atnf.csiro.au)
Thu, 12 Sep 1996 15:42:27 +1000
Jason Burrell writes:
> I have two IDE drives on this old 386 here, and each drive has a swap
> partition. After realizing that all my programs were running on /dev/hdb,
> and my swap was being used first on /dev/hda, I decided to unmount and
> remount the partitions, changing the priorities to favour /dev/hdb. (I
> assume the switching overhead costs more than the movement, especially
> considering that something here, presumably the drive, eats a lot of
> "system" time as shown in 'top'.)
NO! It can take 10s of milliseconds for the head to move from your
home/data/OS partition to your swap partition. It should take far less
for a transfer to complete (and hence open the IDE channel for another
disc). I recently invested in another SCSI drive so that I can put my
data on a different disc than my swap. This has made some things
easily 3x faster. Waiting for your head to move to and from your swap
partition is wasted time (especially if you have another drive
available).
Regards,
Richard....