Swap Partitions

[Kowood]

Kay, so I've got a fairly small amount of memory (256mb), small for what I want to do (run Blender 3d without having to wait a freaking hour to rotate the view 90 degrees). I've got a 500mb swap partition...I know these function kind of like memory (correct me if I'm wrong), so I'd like to stick Blender onto the swap partition so it would run faster. Is there a way to do this?

[UnderScore]

I believe you are confusing the swap space for something that it isn't.
Swap partition or swap file in Windows, is virtual memory. When your tasks have filled the real RAM then the system swaps portions of the filled RAM to the hard disk, the swap partition or the swap file. This frees up some RAM so that you can do another memory intensive task and thus you have made the system use more RAM than what is physically available. See this site for Windows centric explanantion of swap & virtual RAM. http://computer.howstuffworks.com/virtual-memory1.htm. See this site for a more linux oriented explanation of swap partition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swap_partition.

I've got a 500mb swap partition...I know these function kind of like memory (correct me if I'm wrong), so I'd like to stick Blender onto the swap partition so it would run faster. Is there a way to do this?

It is very unlikly that you could use place blender onto the swap partition as you describe in order to speed it up. Are you postitive that it is the RAM that is making the rendering take so long? 3D rendering can be RAM intensive but is usually just number crunching & requires more CPU as opposed to more RAM. Do you hear the hard drive thrashing & making lots of noise when you rotate the 3D objects? If so then that is an indication that you need more RAM.

[jjmac]

Look in "top" for X running with a neg "nice" value. If so, set it to "0".

In a deb system /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config should have its' start up config.


jm

[mr_ed]

Yeah, swap space is only for system use. In order for you to use it, you'd have to reformat the partition, changing it from type swap to type ext2 or ext3 or whatever - and then the system couldn't use it for swap.

-- Ed