Scratch/swap space

[James Bond]

What's the purpose of having a "scratch" partition (is that what its called? or swap maybe)?

Does it go hand in hand with things in RAM?

 

[Nothinman]

Depends on what you're talking about and is usually pretty specific to the application. For example Photoshop makes you specify one because Adobe does their own memory management crap, probably holdover from OS <X days that they haven't gotten rid of yet. For A/V stuff it's usually a good idea to have a physical, dedicated scratch drive so that I/O from the rest of the system doesn't interfere with captures.

On unix it's customary to make /tmp separate filesystem whenever it's going to be used by multiple users so that no one user can fill up the root filesystem and some people like running with / being mounted read-only. These days I don't think it really matters too much though since I doubt any of the free unixes do anything bad when / fills up anyway.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: Tizyler
What's the purpose of having a "scratch" partition (is that what its called? or swap maybe)?

Does it go hand in hand with things in RAM?

The basic oversimplified idea is that you have a limited amount of RAM, and you will likely try to load more into memory than you have physical capacity for. The swap file is used as "extra memory" in the case.

Often people put it on its own partition for several reasons. It keeps it separate from your files, but its actually slower that way in a single drive system. If you put it on a separate drive, it'll be faster overall. Linux, on the other hand, requires the swap to be in a separate partition no matter what.

 

[Nothinman]

Linux, on the other hand, requires the swap to be in a separate partition no matter what.

Not at all, Linux has supported swap files for as long as I can remember it's just that none of the distro installers use them AFAIK.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Linux, on the other hand, requires the swap to be in a separate partition no matter what.

Not at all, Linux has supported swap files for as long as I can remember it's just that none of the distro installers use them AFAIK.

Ah, well then I stand corrected.

 

[Nothinman]

I'm really not sure why none have switched over, the performance penalty they used to incur has been gone for a long time and all they'd really have to do is make sure whatever filesystem they put it on is mounted before doing 'swapon -a' in their init scripts.