Swap Partition?

[byovic]

Has anyone installed and used a swap partition with the precedent? Got my 16gb class 10 on the way and wanted to try it but have gotten mixed views from forums on other phones whether or not would help or is even worth trying. Kinda new to whole android scene and you guys have helped plenty within the last few days.

 

[akashik]

Do you mean something like this?

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.buak.Link2SD&hl=en

Link2SD Installation:

What you need:
- root permission.
- a second partition on your SD card.

You should have two partitions on SD card and both should be primary.
The first FAT partition is your standard SD card storage. The second partition is used for application files and can be ext2, ext3, ext4 or FAT32.
Some phones lack the ext2, ext3 or ext4 file system support and you may get mount errors like "no such device", "invalid argument". These phones need ext2.ko or ext3.ko modules and even some additional modules to be able to mount. Using FAT32 on the second partition will eleminate such problems, because FAT32 is supported on all phones.

Link2SD does not create the second partition, you need to create it yourself. You can use any partition manager such as Minitool, Paragon, Easeus etc. for this.

How it works:
Link2SD mounts the second partition of your SD card and makes OS mounts it at boot time.

When press "Create Link" button Link2SD moves apk file, dalvik-cache (.dex) file and lib files (.so) to SD card's 2nd partition and creates symbolic links in original directories.

I split my 8 gig card into 1 gig for the partition and 7 for app space. I see no real reason to partition the drive as I haven't seen any real advantage to having it there.

If you mean something else, link to some information. Sounds interesting.

 

[Rukbat]

There's been a lot of discussion about using a swap partition on the web, but what it boils down to is this: No matter what app you use to speed up your SD card, it's still VERY slow compared to RAM, so it's not going to make the phone any faster to use a swap partition. Search for "android swap partition" and you can spend a few hours reading some expert opinions.

 

[byovic]

There's been a lot of discussion about using a swap partition on the web, but what it boils down to is this: No matter what app you use to speed up your SD card, it's still VERY slow compared to RAM, so it's not going to make the phone any faster to use a swap partition. Search for "android swap partition" and you can spend a few hours reading some expert opinions.

I have read quite a few different opinions on running a swap partition and figured I would ask here to see if anyone has done this to this phone. Oh well thanks for the replies guys think im gonna bite the bullet and try it today when it gets here. What I meant earlier was to use CWM to create a swap partition plus the extended system partition to use with link2sd. Thanks guys I'll let ya know if this helps at all.

 

[Rukbat]

I have read quite a few different opinions on running a swap partition and figured I would ask here to see if anyone has done this to this phone. Oh well thanks for the replies guys think im gonna bite the bullet and try it today when it gets here. What I meant earlier was to use CWM to create a swap partition plus the extended system partition to use with link2sd. Thanks guys I'll let ya know if this helps at all.

If you read how Android (the operating system itself) works, you'll see that there's no need for one. Android already "swaps out" any app that's taking room that Android needs. (Then can swap it back in the state it was when it was swapped out.) Killing apps and using a swap partition will give you a warm and fuzzy feeling, because you have "more free RAM", but force killing (which is what the OS does) is a LOT faster than swapping. Let the OS do its thing - it was designed knowing that there's no swap partition (or need for one). Why Android Swap Doesn’t Make Sense Zero Credibility is one simple and fairly non-technical explanation. (There's another one, written by one of the people who designed the OS, but I can't find it at the moment.)

 

[FalconFour]

OK, well, bumping this because it's a top web result for "android swap partition" now.

It's nice and all that Android *tries* to conserve/free memory as needed (like a 5-year-old "tries" to go to bed). In reality, it fails miserably and it's resulted in my phone nearly getting snapped in half many times out of frustration with low-memory problems. I've got a Nexus S 4G - and I know this isn't the forum for that - that has <512mb RAM. For some reason it *NEVER* has any free memory available - nor cached memory. All consumed by background apps and services I *do not want* running - but can't stop. System crap, like the Home launcher, which I don't want to completely exit and have it tediously re-initialize every time I hit "Home" (when I hit home, I want it back to the launcher in under one second - not TEN!). The "NFC service" which I can't exit. About 60mb of Bluetooth daemons. All kinds of idle crap that has resources being consumed by static resources that could be swapped out to a swap file/partition and have the relevant parts loaded on demand.

I've dug deep into the developer tools with this phone and found no way to free memory. All components consume over 20MB of RAM each, due to bloat in the Android OS since that article was written in 2009. Today, I believe it could greatly benefit the OS to have swap available, because the OS has grown far beyond its means and it's now crippling once-useful devices with runaway garbage. I can't even stand to use my phone for more than one thing anymore: music in the car (Spotify) and navigation/GPS logging (Waze) simultaneously. Spotify skips because the phone keeps cycling background task-kills that often includes Spotify itself. I damn near go road-rage out of control when Spotify gets task-killed with Waze in the foreground - and that's ALL I opened!

Seriously. That article is from 2009. We need swap now.