Swap partition for FreeBSD

[Eduardo Morras]

On Sat, 16 May 2015 15:45:08 +0530
Avinash Sonawane <rootkea at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 3:43 PM, Avinash Sonawane <rootkea at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 3:30 PM, Eduardo Morras <emorrasg at yahoo.es>
> > wrote:
> >> On Sat, 16 May 2015 13:11:18 +0530
> >> Avinash Sonawane <rootkea at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>> Hello all!
> >>>
> >>> I was trying to build www/webkit-gtk3 (a dependency for
> >>> x11/gnome3) then it abruptly exited with "Out of swap space
> >>> error" so I created a separate 8GB partition to be used as
> >>> freebsd-swap.
> >>
> >> Why don't use a regular file as swap?
> >
> > Because I read somewhere that swap partition is much more faster
> > than swap file and given that I already have 4GB RAM and then too I
> > was posed with "out of RAM/swap space" like error (which I never
> > anticipated) I wanted a more and faster swap. So dedicated swap
> > partition.
> >
> > --
> > Avinash Sonawane (RootKea)
> > PICT, Pune
> > http://rootkea.wordpress.com
> 
> May be this will justify:
> http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/2211
> 
> -- 
> Avinash Sonawane (RootKea)

Well.... some points (+) to use a swap file:

a) faster creation / delete. Root shell script can do it in one step.
b) don't need to touch your partitions/slices scheme. An error on this step and your server/pc becomes a brick for a while
c) the difference in speed with/to a partition dedicated swap is minimal or null
d) the work, compile gnome3, would be finished yesterday ;) (yes, this is a smile)

some points (-) to use swap file:

a) may have less speed (each write access needs to modify the file metadata and journal if su+j is active)
b) you don't learn how to work with slices and partitions on FreeBSD or repair them

The link you provide, it's an answer from 2010 to a Linux user. Some points would not be applicable to FreeBSD or be outdated.

---   ---
Eduardo Morras <emorrasg at yahoo.es>