Just to try it out, I repartitioned my drive with the ext2 partiton(Linux) as hdc1 and put the swap as hdc2.

The only thing that I could think of was that I would possibly make the read-write head of the HD do extra work because it may be traveling a greater distance from the swap to the presently used section of hdc1 (probably closer to the begining of hdc1 most of the time).

As far as funcionality go's, it seems to work fine. Then again, since I don't know squat about how the Linux file system works, my swap may have not even been used yet since I have 512Mb of ram.
Does Linux use it's swap file anyway ?
Or does swapfile usage engage oly when needed ?

Is doing it this way a peformance issue ?
Is there anything else that I should be concerned with ?

edit : nice spelling on the title . I wish there was a way to correct that.

JC

You can see if your swap is used when you run 'top'. The info is in the line beginning with 'Swap' (5th line). If you've got 512MB RAM, I guess swap is not used. In your situation, it may be at the end.

Install Gkrellm , and it should have a krell monitor that will show swap usage. Outside of gaming, I have never even touched my swap drive, and I only have 256MB DDR.

slight

Thanks for the replies. With the 'top' command, it showed that only 1Mb of my 376Mb swapfile was being used.
And from what slightcrazed is saying, even if I put my machine under a heavy load ( like 3d gaming ), I will probably not use my swap file, as slightcrazed has 256Mb ram and gets by with no swapfile usage.

Cool!

JC