*BSD News Article 59692


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From: nbc@vulture.dmem.strath.ac.uk (Neil Brendan Clark)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: 2 swap devices: does it make sense?
Date: 15 Jan 1996 23:17:32 -0000
Organization: University of Strathclyde
Lines: 12
Message-ID: <4denac$re@vulture.dmem.strath.ac.uk>
References: <87u41zetl7.fsf@compi.hobby.nl>
NNTP-Posting-Host: vulture.dmem.strath.ac.uk

Peter Mutsaers <plm@compi.hobby.nl> wrote:
>If I define 2 swap devices, each on a different disk, and I'm doing
>heavy disk I/O: will both swap devices be used by FreeBSD 2.1 to
>divide the disk I/O over the two disks?

Swap devices are interleaved, so the answer is yes. How effective this
strategy is would (I imagine) depend on your hard disks; for example, I
am unsure how useful two IDE disks would be since CPU time is used by
data transfers, but SCSI drives would give a definite improvement. At least,
that is, if the world is a fair place ;-)

Neil