Swapping to a large sparse file

[Chris Murphy]

On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 8:05 PM, jd1008 <jd1008 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes, I knew about what gparted can do. I had tried it
> on a 1tb drive, and it still took at least 2  hours.
> Maybe there was an issue with the sata internal bus???

We'd need dmesg to have any idea about that. Anytime I've done only an
fs shrink or grow with ext4, it's taken less than a minute. Two hours
sounds like the partition was being moved, not just shrunk. Since ext3
doesn't use extents or preallocation it's prone to more fragmentation
but 2 hours is a long time.

The thing is, swap is as fundamental to the system as the root volume,
so I'd be inclined to make the necessary space on the internal drive
and offload other things as needed.

-- 
Chris Murphy