how to tell Ubuntu to use swap space?

ceantuco · 10-14-2009, 10:29 PM

wowwwww thank you guys for all your posts! I finally took a look at my friends laptop after work. 120GB HD which UBUNTU is the only OS, 1GB Hard Drive, 2GB Swap Partition which was being used (run the free command) but it was a bit slow, like to open programs and stuff, also the Internet was slow. I ran a OpenSuse live CD and worked just fine so we decided to install OPENSuse 11.1 and now the laptop is working fine. I wonder if there was something wrong with one of the drivers Ubuntu was using. perhaps the Video driver.
Thank you guys for all your answers!

johnsfine · 10-15-2009, 08:00 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ceantuco

1GB Hard Drive

I assume you mean 1GB ram.

Quote:

2GB Swap Partition which was being used

That implies some services were installed that would be appropriate to a server, but not to a laptop workstation.

Now that you overwrote the whole thing, you'll probably never know what was installed that shouldn't have been. Before overwriting the Ubuntu install, I think you could have poked around a bit to see what services were enabled that shouldn't have been and then deinstalled them.

Quote:

I wonder if there was something wrong with one of the drivers Ubuntu was using. perhaps the Video driver.

From some of those symptoms I might suspect Video drivers or network drivers or even SATA drivers. One or more of those might even be correct. But I think unnecessary services is more likely.

ceantuco · 10-15-2009, 03:42 PM

yeah, 1GB Ram... I wanted to poke around the system but my friend said he wanted to use Suse so I installed it! lol but I think we will go back to Ubuntu.. Suse is a bit complicated for newbies!

SaintDanBert · 10-15-2009, 06:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ceantuco

I think what the problem is that he doesn't have a swap space.
... but how can I tell the system to permanently use that space?

If you have a reasonably recent set of hardware with 2-4 GB RAM,
it is entirely possible that you won't use swap space even if you
create it.

I have 4 GB of RAM with a 4GB swap partition. In two years, it has never been used that I'm aware of. I'm not running a huge "load average" or 1000 processes so everything stays in RAM.

I think that swap space gets used for suspend and hibernate and similar operations under some circumstances. After all, it is an on disk scratch pad that the kernel controls for its exclusive use.

A hundred and eleven years ago, IBM did research that reported "... virtual memory systems run best with large amounts of physical memory ..." RAM is cheap and fast. Disk is cheap and slow[er]. Add RAM and forget swap.

If anyone can point out a good clear explanation of when and why a linux workstation (not server) needs swap space, I'd love to see the details. Real servers are another matter.

Cheers,
~~~ 0;-Dan