Still, an SSD makes this all better. When I was using virtual memory on a Ubuntu server and put the swap partition on an SSD, everything worked great. On a rotating platter, not so much.
Oh, no question, SSDs are an improvement. I'm just clarifying the systems concepts involved. SSDs everywhere may change some assumptions in the operating system. For quite a while now, we've considered paging to "disk" as performance death, and have gone through contortions to make good decisions about which pages should be paged out. If paging to "disk" everywhere gets several orders of magnitudes cheaper, we may want to do less up-front processing trying to determine good victim pages.
scott_s|14 years ago