Gurus on not Gurus, my experience is essential and i always made such as i know and such as i see.

Yes, but I would place it where the disk throughput is lowest!

In a modern system, swap is there for insurance, not for heavy use. Let files that really get used have the beginning (faster) part of the disk.

If you have too little ram for the active portion of the anonymous data in use by your programs, then swap speed is critical. With swap in the fastest position on disk, you could have a really slow system instead of a really incredibly slow system. But I don't think that is the situation for anyone asking current questions about swap. If you have too little ram for your workload, get more ram.

Of course, it should be acc. to you need .

The concept that there is a speed advantage in placement on disk is another hoary old chestnut that should be discarded. The I/O elevator(s) in use on almost all systems negate that premise completely.
Not to mention disk caching - and yes, swap now uses (compressed) cache to reduce any meagre physical I/O that does actually occur.

Try testing that (I have). Disk position can make a big difference.

As have I. Test cases can be constructed to generate any outcome desired.
For the normal (home) user, I stand by my contention.

If i have understand well, and it is true what you all say, then it is better a swap file: you can put it in the first part of disk, it is more easy and more fast its access, it garantees more performance and it is more easy to manage (you can resize it how you want). May be a little difference only what file system you want to use and by its performance depend the performance of the swap.

I found this small comparing

Swap file == slow, slow performance, ext3/ext2 format -> not dedicated
Swap partition == good performance, dedicated for swapping only, in swap format

About systems with swap or without swap, today i have found some tests that i have made on my old desktop some years ago: it had 512mb of ram and slackware with 2.4 kernel. Without swap some applications does not works well and it often did crash during startup, example openoffice or gimp (in this case, i think, the memory is not workload at 100%, but kernel use swap); as well as did not work correctly some small applications and utilities that did resident in memory, they often did freeze. The situation did change completly with swap, file or partition; the same ram size or its double seems to be a good solution. I do not know you, but i do not trust of a system without swap.

On a desktop system, where the chance of actually using swap space is relatively small anyhow, a swap-file probably works just fine and it is perhaps somewhat easier to manage. Many operating systems use this technique by-default. The impact of one strategy vs. another can be expected to be "negligible" because the predicted use of swap is also, "negligible." RAM is now plentiful and cheap. (The "buck-a-meg" pricing model that was once contemplated by Japanese silicon manufacturers fortunately blew up in their faces.)

@syg00
(magnetic) disk drive is a lot faster at outer sectors.


there is one disadvantage with swap partition, you use up one of four primary partitions. now, it is possible to put swap on extended/logical partition, but it could produce some errors (at least it did in my case).

perhaps fragmentation might be problem when using swap file.

I think that the main linux distros should have in theirs install process the choice between swap file or partition; it seems to be more better first or second, it depend by the different cases.
However there are not never very important differences in performance, may be a bit more better a swap file in a first primary partition.

I think the swap file is not very common choice, from now and in the future these posts should have the effect to change the opinion and the habitudes of a lot of you ;-)

Even in a desktop system you have several processes accessing
disk at the same time, so the discussion about where to put
which files is pretty mote - most of the time spent will be
head movement of the disk, not on sequential reads from one
region of disk; more so in server class machines.

And while swap may not be heavily used in desktop system
with loads of RAM to spare the kernel paging out unused
or less used files may still make a noticeable performance
improvement by using the freed up RAM for caching of actually
heavily used bits.

I don't think that having swap, and swap in a separate
partition, is obsolete just because RAM is cheap. Even
on a box w/ 4GB I saw free RAM dwindling, and SWAP growing
ever so fast when e.g., using calibre to convert HTML docu
to epub for easy reading on an android pad. W/o swap the
OOM killer would have struck.


Cheers,
Tink

s/mote/moot/
This is precisely the point. And the I/O elevators delay and consolidate I/O's to better utilise the disk. You have no say in the matter in a normal setup. And yes, swap does get included.