is swap partition really needed ?
 

hi all,
i use slack 9.0 on my system. I have 384 MB RAM, and my / is about 2GB. My question is : is the swap partition (in mycase 192 MB) really necessary ? Whenever I do "cat /proc/meminfo" or "free", the amount of swap space actually used is zero. So can I remove swap partition?
Also, I tried this cmd first : "swapoff /dev/ha8". Even after that all progs including KDE were working fine without any delay.

You can remove it if you want.
But I do NOT recommend it. :tisk:

The minimum recommended size for Swap is 32 MB.

If you do bring it down and something goes wrong :cry: , DO NOT blame me.

I believe the newer kernels don't need (as much) swap if you have a decent amount of memory, but I usually make a 128 mb swap. When I do tons of stuff (compiling, listening to audio, moving files around, surfing and emailing), I use a little swap, usually less than 50 mb. I have 512MB RAM.

I have 512mb of ram and I have always had about the same results with or without swap.

Hi rajorshi

Depends on what you use your computer for - With that much RAM you could certainly try it.

related to his post...
 

My server is a Dual P3 850mhz with 2GB of ECC RAM
I have never actually used any of my 2GB swap drive ( i was listening to old conventions of 1-2xRam).
I wouldn't mind getting rid of my swap file, but a couple of questions first...

One, if I don't have a swap file, and for some reason my system uses all 2GB, what happens? The program trying to access the "non-existent" ram will just crash? Even with my webserver, ftp, ssh, and hlds I never get more than like, 4% of Ram used.

secondly, can I get rid of my 2gb swap w/o doing a reinstall? or even just resize my swap file to say, 512mb, or something much smaller? I don't want to reinstall everything. I've used Partition Magic in windoze, and I'm sure it's super easy but I couldn't find anything during my brief search.

Thirdly, what are some other cool things to run on my server? :) I have lots of unmanaged bandwidth, cpu power, Ram, and HD space, but not much stuff to use it on. Give me some ideas :) Thanks.

tobz

You can always run SETI@home on your idle CPU power. That is, if you are interested in Science and Space.

SETI@home

If you are interested in a daemon, you could run an IRC server or something.

Thanks. Can I run an IRC server that will allow me to connect to all of the channels? I am having trouble finding an IRC server, all of them are timing out as I go down the list. I'm not a big fan of SETI, but you reminded me of GIMPS, so I might take part in that. Thanks again!

tobz

btw, what exactly do you mean by daemon, it's probably simpler than i'm making it out to be, but i did a google search and can't figure out exactly what one is...

tobz

When I used Slack 9 I only had 256 MB of RAM and was running without a swap partition. I even ran KDE and it didn't even seem slow.

Ok, thanks
 

I've decided to get rid of my swap file for a while, and see how things go. Can I get rid of it "gently" ? Or will I end up having to reinstall something?

TIA

tobz