Comment by tombert
5 hours ago
I've thought about doing stuff like that (or mounting S3), but I've never done it because I figured that the latency would be enormous and it would be too slow to actually be useful.
That said, I could actually kind of see it being useful for stuff that doesn't need to be super fast but does allocate a lot of RAM (though I'm drawing a blank on what that would be at the moment).
Enormous latency is all relative. A network drive on a local network holding a swap file would still outperform some number of computers I've owned that put their swap on much, much slower hard drives of their time. Of course, nobody was trying to swap two gigabytes to these drives as that would have been 10 times their capacity....