On Wed, 3 Sep 2014 18:08:36 Daniel J Jitnah wrote:
It makes sense! When you think about it, the time stamp on a swap file is hardly useful information.
The fact that you wanted to see it in the first place indicates that it is useful on occasion.
Besides updating the time stamp each time swap is written to could be regarded as wasted critical cpu cycles.
CPU is not an issue. Disk access is an issue. For small writes if the mtime is updated you can double the disk IO requirement and worse than double it in the case of filesystems with journalled metadata.
It appears that using the swap file doesn't operate in the same manner as other filesystem access.
That does raise more questions on having swap on a ssd only system. There are VPS providers now that are offering VPS's using ssd's. It looks that they are not also providing swap. For small VPS say 1gb ram or less, swap is desirable.
Not providing swap by default doesn't stop you from setting it up in most cases. It's possible for a VPS provider to force you to use a kernel compiled without swap support but I'm not aware of examples of anyone doing that. I've been using linode.com for a long time, they have always supported swap partitions through the management GUI. Recently they transitioned to using SSD for everything. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/ -- Sent from my Samsung Galaxy Note 2 with K-9 Mail.