What about swap fragmentation? 640MB is the max for an iBook, and I often see page-outs (I run a lot of crap). If I'm paging while I'm launching apps, won't my swap get fragmented and hence slower? And wouldn't putting swap on a dedicated -- if small -- partition avoid this?

Edited by author 06-24-2002 11:54 AM
What Sakusha said. BSD based swapping is very efficent. You need to have swap, but with 640MB of main memory, you'll only need the minimum of swap space. Putting wwap on a seperate device (and with IDE, you need a seperate drive *and* controller to really see any benefit) makes sense in low ram conditions. Well, it did until about 2 years ago. Now the proper answer is "Throw $30 US at the problem and get more ram.")

A dedicated swap partition will make absolutely no difference in performance unless it's on a separate drive. Not applicable to your config.

No, it is not worth it. With 640MB you will be swapping very very rarely. If you aren't swapping out, you don't need the partition. IMO, a swap partition is stupid anyway, but especially so when you have a ton of RAM. :)

It would be a waste of time and space.