[zeller]

Howdy,

Does anyone have any conclusive evidence that having a seperate swap partition on the same hard drive speeds up OS X? I have yet to see any benchmarking (yes, I've searched the archives here).

How about journaling - anyone have benchmarks on how journaling affects swapping performance?

I ask because I currently have the 40 gig HD on my Jaguar-running powerbook set up with two partitions: swap and data. I'm going to go to Panther, and this would be a good time to recover that extra gig of drive space if it is not actually doing anything.

I am aware that theoretically, the seperate partition means that my swap file won't get fragmented, but I have a hard time imagining that this really affects performance in any meaningful way.

Anyone have any words of wisdom to share?

Ben

[octane]

I'd put the swap space on a different HD, rather than a separate partition, you'll notice a difference then, especially in programs such as Photoshop.

Journaling can speed up a few tasks, and someone over at Macosxhints had a link to a page that benchmarked it. Journaling on will also allow OS X to use the defragmentation tool, but only for files under 20MB, I think.

[zeller]

Can't use a separate HD - it's in a powerbook.

[octane]

Originally posted by zeller:
Can't use a separate HD - it's in a powerbook.

Ah... I've got a similar setup to you. My PB has a 40GB HD and I initially thought I'd partition it, but I remember from before that it just made things a little complicated when I ran into a wall with space on one of the partitions. I'd leave it unpartitioned, personally, and make use of the space you'd be dedicating to the swap.