I have been using my internal flash partition as a swap for a while and i wonder if it's better than swap in a memory card...

So the question: Is internal flash faster than sd-card?

For me internal is bit (20%) slower than my high-speed micro sdhc.
The same was for Qole's EasyDebian - on microsd seems faster to me.
The other issue is that I prefer to have microsd corrupted someday instead of internal flash.
Access is the other thing - I don't know the influence if app uses data from mmc1 and utilize swap on mmc2 is it better or worse - I can't tell.

The limitation on read speed is in the n8x0's data bus itself, not the memory.

The write speeds on the internal memory are class 4 so if you have a class 6 card it would be faster.

By "internal flash partition" do you mean 256 MB internal flash? It has compressed file system so it's slow. Or did you mean something else?

Yes, i meant the 256Mb internal flash. But as swap, not as jffs2, so it's not compressed.

Is internal flash faster than memorycard for swap use?

Then you don't mean the internal 256MB NAND flash, you mean the 2 GB internal mmc. They are very different.
And I also found my external mmc (class 4) a bit faster than the internal one, but not much.

When i transfer files from my ubuntu-box
- to the internal flash it's about 7.1 Mb/s (speed when i upgrade the firmware)
- to the internal SD it's about 2.6 Mb/s (speed when i copy a lot of ~8mb mp3 files)

Moving files from card => card or from flash => card is about the same 2.6 Mb/s

So the internal flash should be faster ?

Internal 256MB flash is raw NAND chip without any translation layer so there is no block device interface (which is needed for swap) and no wear leveling and bad block management. With such translation layer done in software (jffs2 is one such example but totally unsuitable for swap) it won't be faster than SD/MMC card.

IMO internal flash is good only for keeping clean bootable system for easier recovery.

Thanks fanoush, for answering my question