Comment 4 for bug 1374166

@Daniel,

I did all the testing before and came to the same result (as you are probably aware of) BUT with a different CONCLUSION.

I personally concluded that the use of swap partitions, if ever desirable, is (also) not desirable in the current case AND certainly not on an ephemeral disk, given that:

1 - a swap partition at the beginning of a device/disk can be efficient, but will lead to a waste of disk space, with this being static,
2 - a huge swap partition (if someone makes that strange mistake) will result in severe problems and performance issues,
3 - a swap partition at creation time considerably reduces "provisioning speed/performance",
4 - a swap partition can become huge (i.e. too large) if a VM is upgraded to a larger size (with a larger ephemeral disk),
5 - an OPTIMAL swap partition should be a function of memory (similar to logic introduced with cloud-config setting swap).

Moreover, the swap partition as such can become obsolete, given the swap function(s) in cloud-init versions 0.7.6 and 0.7.7.

In short, I have an issue with the procentual division of the disk, into a normal partition and a swap partition.

The percentage assigned to the swap partition should be able to allow for

- automated calculations of the percentage (via logic, to optimize swap space)
- manual overrides of the automated calculations

Kind regards....