Which hardware?

[Jonathan Carter]

On Fri, 2006-06-16 at 07:11 +0200, Knut Yrvin wrote:
> So the startup time is 5-6 sec on a system with enough RAM, and the
> main applications already used earlier on the day (stored in the temp
> area in RAM). When the system uses swapping on disk, the performance
> drops drastic.

Your disk performance also drops down heavily, especially when users
start Gnome or OpenOffice.org, and the disk needs access to lots of
little files, while at the same time, it's reading/writing to swap
that's probably at the other end of the disk. By then you're getting no
where close to 80MB/s, and the system gets very, very sluggishly.
Spanning swap over two disks also helps. I don't know exactly how clever
the kernel is with spanning, and whether it will write to the disk that
is least busy, but I've definitely seen performance improvements when
spanning a swap file over disks.

-Jonathan