I've seen various recommendations for adding swap files after
system creation, and it occurs to me that the "standard" technique
may not be the most efficient. I realize that one rarely creates
swap files, but nonetheless on occasion one needs to "precreate"
some file or other, then do something to it, like mkfs etc.
Anyway, mostly trying to improve my general knowledge of
how best to use the abilities of the system, and my understanding
of the relative merits of doing things one way vs. another,
not trying to speed up rarely performed procedures.
The standard technique is to do something like
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/path/to/new/file bs=1024 count=524288
$ mkswap /path/to/new/file
to create a 512MB file. The second command may be different,
depending upon the circumstances, but the technique remains
the same. In effect, the new file gets written twice.
It occurs to me that one could, instead, do
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/path/to/new/file bs=1M seek=511 count=1
$ mkswap /path/to/new/file
and have the same results, requiring only writing the file
once.
$ time dd if=/dev/zero of=file1 bs=1024 count=524288
524288+0 records in
524288+0 records out
real 0m17.898s
user 0m0.528s
sys 0m4.895s
$ time /sbin/mkswap file1
Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 536866 kB
real 0m0.432s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.024s
$ time dd if=/dev/zero of=file2 bs=1M seek=511 count=1
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
real 0m0.077s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.007s
$ time /sbin/mkswap file2
Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 536866 kB
real 0m0.024s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.004s
$ diff -s file1 file2
Files file1 and file2 are identical
My guess is that when the swap file with a "hole" first gets used, there
will be a long(ish?) pause while some part or parts of the sparse file
get filled in. This is not so good for a swap file, but when one
is actually going to rewrite most of the file anyway, and is only
using the file itself as more or less an indicator of the size, then
it might make sense.
Comments?
Mike
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