[Novalug] Does swap shorten the life of solid state drives?
Jon LaBadie
novalugml@jgcomp.com
Thu Jan 27 03:23:30 EST 2011
On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 05:39:45PM -0800, John Christopher wrote:
> I have a 30 GB SSD, 2 GB RAM, and Ubuntu 10.10.
> I bought the SSD back in October 2010.
> This is a light duty family computer that gets
> used for web surfing, writing homework papers
> on OpenOffice, etc.
>
> According to a podcast I listened to recently,
> if you have an SSD and you are using Linux,
> you should turn off swap because the swap
> partition will be written to far more often
> than the other partitions. Is this correct?
> If so, how do I turn off swap?
>
> Thanks for your help.
Jason already noted swapoff/swapon, but another use for swapon
is to show current swap usage:
$ swapon -s
Filename Type Size Used Priority
/dev/sda2 partition 8385924 8 -1
This systems has been up for about 18 hours and currently only
8 1K blocks, out of 8 million are in use.
But what about over time? The iostat command can report on total
disk activity since boot.
$ iostat /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2 /dev/dm-?
Linux 2.6.35.10-74.fc14.i686.PAE (mums.jgcomp.com) 01/27/2011 _i686_ (2 CPU)
avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle
6.51 3.12 18.86 0.25 0.00 71.26
Device: tps Blk_read/s Blk_wrtn/s Blk_read Blk_wrtn Mnt_Point *
sda1 0.02 0.09 0.00 4758 20 /boot
sda2 0.01 0.07 0.00 3524 0 swap
dm-0 1.53 20.68 7.53 1105922 402488 /
dm-1 0.02 0.06 0.08 3106 4288 /var/spool
dm-2 1.15 11.81 7.01 631866 375120 /var
dm-3 0.01 0.05 0.01 2618 304 /usr/local
dm-4 0.26 0.06 2.03 3082 108472 /tmp
dm-5 0.85 2.38 5.96 127034 318768 /home
dm-6 0.46 2.62 3.49 140090 186720 /opt
dm-7 7.30 47.92 53.41 2563058 2856552 /vm
* I added the mount point column.
The data represent all activity on each partition since boot.
To me, it doesn't seem like swap gets much activity.
Jon
--
Jon H. LaBadie novalugml@jgcomp.com
JG Computing
12027 Creekbend Drive (703) 787-0884
Reston, VA 20194 (703) 787-0922 (fax)
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