If they improved swap file that's fine but by the very nature of file systems I would tend to guess the partition swap is a lot closer to the low level calculations that file systems use to manage the files. Therefore it's awfully likely there's another layer on top of that for the file system that's not there for the partition management.
-MilesAhead
Actually, swap in Linux is a lot more accessible and tweakable than it is in Windows. And better documented. If you have multiple swap spaces you can prioritize which gets used first. You can temporarily or permanently tweak what set of conditions triggers a swap ("swappiness"). You can also very easily enable or completely disable swap from the command line. I tend to do that on machines with a lot of RAM. I'll enable swap only if I'm doing something that needs it. Then I'll disable it afterwards.
Good two part article on it here. Part-1 gives the main details. Part-2 gets into tweaking.
You can also temporarily or permanently swap to either a swap partition - or a swap file on a regular partition. That comes in handy if you ever discover you didn't create a big enough swap partition for your requirements. A swap file fixes the problem very nicely until you around to resizing some partitions (also easy to do in Linux) to give you a bigger space if you prefer to keep swap on its own partition.
Yessir! Swap is a whole 'nother beast on Linux. 
-40hz
I know. See my previous posts esp. the one with "round robin" in the text.
It's almost unbelievable Windows has done nothing in all these years regarding swap.
Maybe those guys from DEC quit and nobody else at Redmond has the talent.
I wonder if anyone has info on Windows 7 prefetch vs. swap? I have a feeling it does stuff like swap stuff out so it can prefetch stuff on the preferred list in. It would be interesting to know if setting page file max would have any effect. It might be more conservative if it knew there was a limit other than free disk space? Probably no way to know for sure.
But those type of tweaks was what made Linux an adventure. What killed it for me was the editors. The only thing Windows-ee was Kylix ide editor. It just got distracting trying to remember how to navigate in Emacs. And the help was weird. Kind of needs total immersion to really do it well. I always had the Windows partition crutch. Pretty much had to as some devices I had to initialize with Windows. Then once warm I could boot Linux and use 'em.
Even today if I ask about a Linux editor that feels like a Windows editor I get the same suggestions I tried then. Word processors when I want a text editor. The ones I found with Windows type hotkeys tended to be configured in lisp or python. Just kept me from thinking about what I was typing because I had to think how to type what I was typing.
But it was fun.
Recent Posts
