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On Mon, 2012-11-26 at 09:17 +0100, Florian Philipp wrote: |
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> Am 25.11.2012 23:46, schrieb William Kenworthy: |
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> > Has anyone tried swap on ssd? - has it killed the drive prematurely? - |
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> > any other effects? |
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> > |
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> > I have a system that is maxed with with 4G ram and tends to use swap |
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> > heavily at times which slows things down ... so I am thinking a small |
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> > ssd might help here. |
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> > |
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> |
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> You should tell us which model you want to use. In any case, if it is |
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> relatively recent, I don't think you can actually break it with write |
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> cycles anymore unless you keep it 100% busy 24/7. |
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> |
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> > Another slower alternative is a usb thumbdrive ... might try that later |
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> > today as I have some around ... again anyone tried this and found |
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> > something unexpected? |
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> > |
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> |
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> Thumbdrives have much simpler wear leveling. They also use triple level |
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> cells (TLC) which are even worse than the MLCs found in cheaper SSDs. |
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> Not to forget that USB doesn't support proper DMA and therefore |
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> increases CPU load. Long story short: Swapping on thumbdrives is as fast |
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> as a snail riding a turtle -- but turtles have a longer life span. |
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> |
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> Another idea: |
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> You can try to reduce the swap load by using frontswap with zcache. It |
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> compresses memory pages in RAM which would otherwise be swapped. You |
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> still need swap but less often. |
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> |
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> Enable |
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> FRONTSWAP |
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> CRYPTO |
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> CONFIG_STAGING |
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> CONFIG_ZCACHE |
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> |
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> then add "zcache" to your boot parameters. |
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> |
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> Regards, |
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> Florian Philipp |
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> |
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|
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Now thats interesting, more knobs to twist/buttons to push :) |
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|
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Thanks for that info! |
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|
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My original question was on writing to swap destroying ssd's - but I |
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seem to remember that problem was more hot air than fact - born out by |
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the fact that no-one has jumped with an actual failure. My work macbook |
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air (gentoo of course) has swap on the ssd, but with 8G ram its hardly |
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ever used unlike my home desktop/server which I am talking about here. |
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I did try an early intel ssd for a week (only drive in a dual core atom |
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system) before I had to give it back and it was certainly FAST. |
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|
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Ive just had a a 500G drive expire so the hobby cash I was going to use |
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for the ssd has gone on a new WD 2TB - next month then :( |
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|
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Was pushing a load of 109 at one stage trying to sync a small cephfs |
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cluster with one osd on the failing drive. |
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|
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Yes, I would love to upgrade, but its also a good learning experience to |
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keep pushing the old rig - I dont get to play with this stuff otherwise. |
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|
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Maybe Santa will call this year ... |
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|
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BillK |