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Linux: How to Use RAM as SWAP
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Contributed by Chad Brandt
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Wednesday, 18 August 2004
This article offers the required steps to turn a portion of RAM into swap. One of the reasons might want to try this is that using RAM as swap turns out to be many times less expensive than using most solid state storage solutions as very fast swap, plus it is a lot easier to purchase and implement.Say you have a Linux system, and you are noticing latency. Then you find that the slowness is from the time taken to swap programs back into main memory. Say you have 512 MB of RAM and a 1 GB swap partition on hard disk. Now, what if you could afford to remedy this with a solid state storage device of GB size, and you could just plug it into your computer in an already available slot or connector? This would be used to replace the swap partition. If it were in a PCI connector it could have a maximum transfer rate of perhaps 133 MBytes/sec, which is a lot faster than an IDE drive, for sustained data transfers. Plus, the seek time would be a lot less than a millisecond. If this weren't too expensive, you might go for it? There are some multi-GB rack mount units available for tens of thousands of dollars that fulfill this, and they would reduce the swap in (and out) latency to almost the point where it would not be noticeable.
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