There is a short discussion of this post at the above URL. There is an interesting comment from sweh “The swap issue is well known on linodes. The UML IO tokens system helps mitigate this to some extent ( a UML linode swapping intensively will run out of I/O tokens and so no longer chew up host I/O bandwidth, freeing the other linodes on the same host to continue on as normal)”. That is really interesting, I’ll have to investigate what UML offers in this regard next time I work on such things.

The Linode discussion concludes with SteveG saying “For those that don’t recognize the name, Russell Coker is a long-time Debian maintainer and all-round smart guy”. Thanks SteveG!

Ingo comments on my post at the above URL. He suggests using a separate partition of each disk that is used in the main RAID for swap. While this will allow some partitioning of swap use (so swap of domain 1 won’t necessarily affect domain 2), it doesn’t stop a domain that swaps heavily from impacting the performance of filesystem access.

If someone *really* wants swap on their DomU, they could always create a swap file in their disk storage. However, if the swap ever gets touched the system performance will almost certainly become unacceptably bad, so unless you have some huge single calculation that can’t fit in RAM, why would you want swap? Just scale up your system, either permanently or (if you use something like EC2 or Gandi Hosting) temporarily.