> I do know you can easily measure the difference under the right
> circumstances.  The principle is not much different than that of using
> raw disks for an RDBMS like Oracle, and anyone with a sufficiently large
> Oracle application can tell you that raw disk access is essential.

Database performance is a very different beast from swap performance.
One of the primary reasons for going to raw disks is so that you can
guarantee synchronization.  Otherwise you have to use Unix-style
synchronization, which is comparitively expensive, and generally not a
good fit for a DBMS.  Swap, on the other hand, requires no special
synchronization, so RDBMS performance requirements really don't apply.

			       _MelloN_
--
Ted Lemon							 mellon@vix.com
+1 415 477 5045

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