why doesn't OSX create a dedicated swap partition by defualt?

[vniow]

I just finished reinstalling all my stuff after reformatting my drive because I wanted to try to create a swap partition (Resexcellence link) and wow.

I still get the spinning beach ball of death but it doesn't last nearly as long as it used to, scroling is improved, apps seem to open faster and just the overall overhead seems less, why doesn't OSX do this by default, it sure would quiet at least some of the speed complaints, especially those of us on older systems..

 

[arn]

Re: why doesn't OSX create a dedicated swap partition by defualt?

Originally posted by vniow
I just finished reinstalling all my stuff after reformatting my drive because I wanted to try to create a swap partition (Resexcellence link) and wow.

I still get the spinning beach ball of death but it doesn't last nearly as long as it used to, scroling is improved, apps seem to open faster and just the overall overhead seems less, why doesn't OSX do this by default, it sure would quiet at least some of the speed complaints, especially those of us on older systems..

I doubt the speed up you see is real - especially if you simply repartitioned your single drive. It's most likely 1) placebo vs 2) secondary to the reinstall/reboot and will not sustain.

If you moved your swap drive to a much faster hard drive... then it may help if you consitently run out of ram. But, you could say the same if you simply installed OS X on that faster drive as well.

besides... I think having the swap on a different drive may potentially break future os updates.

arn

 

[vniow]

Re: Re: why doesn't OSX create a dedicated swap partition by defualt?

Originally posted by arn
I doubt the speed up you see is real - especially if you simply repartitioned your single drive. It's most likely 1) placebo vs 2) secondary to the reinstall/reboot and will not sustain.

I don't know it its a placebo effect or not, I do know that several apps take a few less bounces to start after I did this but I guess I'll see after I start using it for awhile...

 

[FattyMembrane]

i was going to try this as well, but i've heard that getting more ram is the way to go. i know that at least one swap file is created regardless of your setup, but i've heard others say that more ram is a better solution than moving the swap to a different partition. how much ram do you have and what kind of work are you doing vniow?

 

[vniow]

Originally posted by FattyMembrane
how much ram do you have and what kind of work are you doing vniow?

I only have 320MB in my iBook (the max although some people have fit 512 chips in) so I need all the extra speed I can get, I use it mostly as a glorified iTunes jukebox but I have Photoshop 5.0 (came with it) and I have to run Classic for that, nothing too serious but I do see the spinning beachball of death more than I'd like.

Just any basic multitasking will bring it down occasionally so I decided to give this a shot and to my suprise it seemed to work!

 

[Kwyjibo]

I tried this on my iBook and it seems to have helped me a little. I made new partitions and it seems to owrk pretty well.

 

[Laslo Panaflex]

Get more ram

Really the best thing to do is spend the money on more ram rather than another hard drive. Going to VM will dramatically lower performace rather than using physical ram (no duh i know!)Using a single hard drive for OS and swap on seperate partition probably won't help that much, might as well use that space for some MP3's rather then swap. Just get more ram, or a 970 Powermac with 450 FSB, which is coming soon. I think that the current macs run OS X as well as they can, when the PPC 970 comes out, OSX will be the best OS to get, that's if you can afford one.