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From: Ed@MEAD.SCRC.Symbolics.COM (Ed Schwalenberg)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: RAM disk as /dev/swap
Message-ID: <10704@brl-adm.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 7-Dec-87 11:56:54 EST
Article-I.D.: brl-adm.10704
Posted: Mon Dec  7 11:56:54 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 12-Dec-87 13:05:56 EST
Sender: news@brl-adm.ARPA
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    From: "Robert C. White" 
    Subject: /dev/swap - possibility of it being a ramdisk
    Date: 6 Dec 87 21:29:22 GMT

    Watching my poor little unix boxes swap, it occurred to me:
    why not utilize some extra ram to implement /dev/swap? It seems that
    the machine would speed up quite a bit, and hey, extra memory
    is pretty inexpensive, at least for the smaller 
    unix boxes. Also, it would be tactically easier to
    increase the amount of "swap" memory as opposed to repartitioning
    my disks, or mounting a disk pack under /tmp or some other 
    horrid kludge.

Given a fixed amount of RAM, it's far better to simply make it all be
"main memory" than to steal some of it and declare it "swap space".
If the RAM is just there, the pages won't have to be swapped at all,
and you win biggest.  If the RAM is "swap space", there will be all
sorts of overhead in copying it back and forth between swap and memory.
If you have a chunk of RAM that cannot be made part of main memory, then
by all means declare it swap space.