Swap and Kernel 2.6.7

d00msweek · 06-17-2004, 09:42 AM

Hello ,

I've just finished compilingthe new kernel 2.6.7 (stable release) but I noticed that X is very slow (especially when i run Mozilla). I "free -m" and the results are :
Total USed Free
Mem : 107 105 1
swap : 125 0 125

Why wasnt swap used? But When I boot to kernel 2.4 everything is OK. Please Help ! Thanks

-Ramon Marco

J.W. · 06-17-2004, 03:34 PM

The less your swap space is used, the better off you are, and zero swap usage is ideal. The situation you describe, where swap is totally unused, is a good thing.

Think about it - operations within RAM are orders of magnitude faster than I/O operations to/from the hard drive, and the only time swap would get used is if you push RAM past 100% capacity and it is forced to write out memory pages to the disk. This is very inefficient, and you want to avoid it as much as possible. -- J.W.

mgargiullo · 06-17-2004, 03:43 PM

the kernel will attemp to load as much as it can into memory for performance sake.

Our web servers run Fedora Core 1 with a Gig of ram. Everything runs from memory, and it's lightening fast.

Swap generally isn't touched.

d00msweek · 06-17-2004, 05:29 PM

ow.. ok

I forgot to add something. When I run "System Monitor" (GNOME) the "used swap" is 0 of 1k and "used memory" is 0 of 1k ???? Why 1k ? I have a 128 MB SDRAM (16mb is used by my video card) and I have 130mb swap.