I had to reinstall OSX over the weekend and, after reading a few more favourable reports on the speed gains with relocating the swapfile, thought I would try it again. Fresh reports of potential problems and the endless pages of Terminal code which promised to overcome them, though, filled my non-geek heart with fear.
I then remembered a small freeware application, Swap Cop, I had downloaded a few weeks back. Swap Cop promised to relocate the swapfile for me, sans Terminal.
So I set up the drive with 3 partitions: a 750 MB partition at the start, one big OSX (+Classic) and a small full 9.22. Did the full install of OS X and all the upgrades, then moved the swapfile with Swap Cop. It worked perfectly and quickly. Rebooted, restarted SwapCop and the old swapfile was deleted.
Performance has improved very noticeably. Six bounces in the Dock to open a disk image prior to the swap, two bounces afterwards. Everything is faster (Quicksilver 733, 768 MB RAM, 10.1.3).
[Editor's note: Some of the speed gain may be a result of reinstalling the system, but the swap move probably helped as well. For those of you who have been afraid of relocating your swap file, give Swap Cop a try.]
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20020410233454624