[Om2008.12] Adding swap space can stop app crashes

[Nelson Castillo]

On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 7:03 PM, Chris Samuel <chris at csamuel.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 17 Jan 2009 10:14:53 am Nick Van Fossen wrote:
>
>> So, I'm a bit lazy so instead of going through the trouble of adding a swap
>> partition, I just created a swap file.
>
> I would say that you're not necessarily being lazy there, if you configure a
> swap partition then you are limiting where the kernel can write bytes on the
> SD card which will lead to uneven wear on it.
>
> In future with a COW SSD aware wear-leveling filsystem like btrfs a swap file
> may end up being more SD friendly as the filesystem may (hopefully!) balance
> out those writes across the card.

I saw this project some time ago. It seems nice but I don't know if it
can be useful for you. I tested with an old laptop I had (X86) and it
worked well. About 7 months ago the author said he had crashes in ARM
arch ... I did not test and I do not know whether the crashes were
fixed.

http://code.google.com/p/compcache/

N.-