On Friday 12 January 2007 03:41, Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@...> wrote 
about '[gentoo-desktop]  Re: CD player recommendations ??':
> "Boyd Stephen Smith Jr." <bss03@...> posted
> 200701111413.31743.bss03@..., excerpted below, on  Thu, 11
> Jan
>
> 2007 14:13:19 -0600:
> > [I'm a little fuzzy here as to weather a read-only
> > page is ever written to actual swap space, the kernel may just
> > remember where (on disk) the original is keep and release the real
> > memory page.]
>
> That's for local disk, anyway.  It's very possibly (and reasonably so)
> different with NFS and other remote file systems, where local swap may
> be rather faster and more dependable than access to the remote file
> system.

Or, on a system where (e.g.) /home is on RAID 6 across 5 disks, and swap is 
on RAID 0 across 5 disks (same disks possibly).  In this case I/O to swap 
is nearly twice as fast, so it may be reasonable to sometimes swap out 
pages that are backed by files or even *filesystem cache*.  This is, in 
fact, fairly similar to my current setup.

You can invent even more esoteric system profiles where (e.g.) swap is many 
times faster than a particular filesystem, especially for small 
(page-size) random writes, even without introducing a network.

-- 
"If there's one thing we've established over the years,
it's that the vast majority of our users don't have the slightest
clue what's best for them in terms of package stability."
-- Gentoo Developer Ciaran McCreesh