Swap space doesn't work

chuoivailua · 02-19-2008, 11:47 AM

Hi,

I'm using Fedora 7 on a box with 1GB of RAM. Because cannot to create too many partitions on hard disk so I disabled swap space on installation. Then I created a swap file and saw it available in KInfoCenter but this swap space was still not used yet although physical memory was going almost full.

I don't know swap space is not necessary or Linux got problem and how to resolve it?

Thanks and pardon me for my bad English

pixellany · 02-19-2008, 11:52 AM

How many partitions do you have? You are limited to 4 primary partitions, but you can have more by using logical partitions. (The limit is ~15 for SATA, and much more for PATA)

chuoivailua · 02-19-2008, 07:34 PM

Forgot to say that I'd tried to remove Windows, reinstalled Fedora and created a swap partition but I got the same problem: KInfoCenter shows it available but never be used.

In fact, my computer was still running well (better than Windows

) but I will use VMware workstation to test something then I'm afraid it has not resource enough to run.

johnsfine · 02-19-2008, 07:40 PM

Windows uses swap files even if everything fits in physical ram.

I'm not sure whether Linux never does that or whether there are some obscure cases. But generally, if everything fits in physical ram, the swap space isn't touched.

gilead · 02-19-2008, 07:42 PM

Just because it's not being used at the moment, doesn't mean that it won't be. What is the output from the free command? It will show how much swap space the system recognises.