My N900 appeared sluggish especially with multiple apps open and suddenly started to grind to a halt to such an extent that it needed a reboot. I started to investigate and then noticed in Conky that there was no swap file. I thought that that was wrong and delved into free and confirmed, no swapfile in use. By examining /dev and /etc/tstab I could see that there was a swap partition on the eMMC and one on my microSD which I'd created when I formatted it. Somehow swap got turned off and clearly there was a missing startup script on my device to turn it on at every boot (now rectified!).

Now there should be a swapfile on the eMMC because the device should run without a microSD card in it so it should be designed to work. However, we know that the life of microSD and eMMC is pretty limited in terms of endless writes. Therefore:

• Where is the best place to have the swapfile?

• Would it not be better to put the swapfile on the microSD card and just replace it when it becomes tired rather than risk the whole device dying due to tired on-board memory?

• If it is on the microSD card, is there an optimum size?

• Am I worrying needlessly?

TIA