[ale] A modest proposal for the times

[Jon "maddog" Hall]

Steve,

Do you swap that much?  If so I would recommend much more RAM.

Also consider putting your system files on the NVMe including all of your
/tmp and /use/tmp files.

As you know Unix and Linux systems are disk intensive, paging object files
directly off the disk.  Putting these on the much faster NVMe might speed
up your system dramatically.  And since solid state memory devices are worn
down mostly by repeated writes, not reads, putting your system files on
there and leaving your (relatively) low access user files on slower media
makes sense to me.

I used to keep my system files on a hybrid 1TB HHD SATA.  It was half SSD
and half HDD.  It used the SSD as a cache, so by putting the system files
on that disk over time the hardware "learned" what blocks were used last
and cached them on the SSD part of the disk for the next time they were
accessed.  This alone took my boot time to multiuser from three minutes to
30 seconds under normal boot.

I have 64 GB of RAM my laptop and I do not remember the last time I was in
a forced swap situation.  Of course YMMV due to different loads.

md


On Thu, Apr 10, 2025, 01:39 Steve Litt via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:

>
> On Mon, 7 Apr 2025 22:02:09 -0400
> "Jon \"maddog\" Hall via Ale" <ale at ale.org> wrote:
>
> > Likewise they have dumped the slower SATA controllers (600 MBytes per
> > second) for M.2 NVMe solid state memories that typically attach to the
> > motherboard's PCIe bus and have speeds of 7,000 MBytes per second or
> > even faster if attached to PCIe 5.0 and doing the equivalent of RAID
> > with them. I have had reports of 20000 MBytes per second reading.
> > They are very thin and I have seen sizes up to 4TB and very price
> > competitive with an external HDD of the same capacity.
>
> I'm very happy for this conversation because now that NVMe's have
> gotten cheaper, on my next build I'll put my swap partition on the
> NVMe. That should speed things up.
>
> SteveT
>
> Steve Litt
> Spring 2023 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful
> Technologist http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques
>
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