[Q] using preinstall as swap, possible?

[chepe263]

I would like to know if is possible to use preinstal partition as swap on stock rom with stock kernel.

what would be the drawbacks of doing such thing?

can be placed a file to act as swap?

 

[ravilov]

On a rooted device, yes. No problem. You don't need a file, you could just format the entire partition as swap. I don't see any drawbacks but I also don't see many benefits to this... For me, the normal physical RAM available to the system is more than enough. I have not been able to fill up more than half of that, not even once.

BTW the total RAM available should be around 700-800 MB. If you have less than that, you probably need to apply the ramfix, which will improve the performance of your device more than any kind of swap.

 

[tamuin]

I would like to know if is possible to use preinstal partition as swap on stock rom with stock kernel.

what would be the drawbacks of doing such thing?

can be placed a file to act as swap?

The advantage of using the internal storage as swap is that it would be faster than putting it on a microSD card. The preinstall partition is certainly large enough to use for swap.

The disadvantage to using internal storage is that flash memory does have a limited life. For normal file access the lifetime of flash memory will most likely exceed the useful life of the phone, but this may not be the case when flash memory is used for swap. Swap will put many more read - write cycles on the flash memory than normal file access.

I use swap; my experience is that I need swap space if I want to use the webtop for anything more than occasional web browsing. Before I enabled swap webtop was regularly warning me that I had low memory (and you can't close the warning message, which is really annoying). I put together a description of what I did in the 7th post on this thread:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2200679​

If you do go ahead and use preinstall as swap, let us know how it works.