install Linux without swap partition?
Hi,
I installed Fedora Core 3 without a swap partition and were warned by the installer that this will affect the perfomance of most installation. Is that true? (after installing, I feel my screen updated a little bit slower - but don't know whether it's my imagination or ...) Can anyone explain what this "swap partition" do? do it act like the swap memory used by Windows? |
yes it's swap memory
it will get used very little if you have alot of ram but you won't have to wonder if it's affecting performance when it becomes needed and it's not there your gui will lock up and freeze solid and will not recover |
Re: install Linux without swap partition?
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Re: Re: install Linux without swap partition?
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Plan to run a window manager with effects? Plan on doing any multitasking? Do you browse using a tabbed browser? Do you do any image editing in The Gimp? If the answer to any of those questions is "yes" then you definitely want swap space, and it should be a minimum of somewhere between 1.5x and 2.5x the amount of installed RAM. I run a gig of RAM on my workstations and when multitasking my machines use swap space. Granted, I often work with high-resolution images intended for print, but it still drives the point home that swap is very necessary. If you don't want to dedicate a partition to swap, you can get by using a file on your / partition, but it may impact performance slightly. |
there's a bunch of threads on this site with arguments about whether you need swap or not. using the above argument would make you believe that having 32 megs of ram with 100 megs swap is more stable than 512 megs of ram with no swap. running out of ram for applications is not worse than running out of ram+swap for applications.
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If you have a lot of ram, usually more than 512 megs or 1gb you can get away without needing a swap space, but in doesn't hurt to configure your system to use, especially if you play games or do stuff thats graphic intensive. There have been a few articles on the net recently rgarding this issue about swap space, so you may want to do a google search to find out other peoples opinions.
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It all comes down to the fact that hard disk space is much cheaper than RAM (well, cheaper in dollars, a lot more expensive in wasted time :) ). You probably won't notice if 1GB is unavailable from your 160GB hard disk, and it could save you from crashes if you ever do manage to use up the RAM.
I've heard the 1.5x to 2.5x figure for swap-to-RAM for many years. I think it definitely applied in the days when most computers had 16MB or 32MB, with 64MB being a rare luxury. The apps of the day demanded more memory than that, especially when multitasking. RAM has caught up, but apps aren't using a proportionally larger amount of if. Even running your heavyweight WM, a browser, some terminals, and OpenOffice all at once is not likely to require 1GB of RAM, let alone the 512MB + 1.5x swap that used to be a recommended minimum. Editing very large graphics might be an exception, but anyone needing such large graphics is likely to have their workstations equipped accordingly. Even then, you'd need to be dealing with in excess of 6,000x5,000-pixel truecolor images to even break 100MB. The only other applications I can think of that might demand so much RAM would be multitrack audio editing and 3D modelling. In short: Give a GB for swap. It can't hurt. But you probably don't need more than that. |
And if ALL else fails one can still create a swap FILE
rather than a partition (with a fair performance penalty, one might add) ... Code:
dd if=/dev/zero of=test.swp bs=1024 count=512000 Cheers, Tink |
Just to put in my 2 cents...
Two of my computers have nice sized RAM for their purpose. The Xless web/mail server: Code:
[16:03][root@vyvyan exim]# free -m The Dual headed X workstation, which gets multitasked a lot (ie: full screen DVD with mplayer and fullscreen pinball :)): Code:
[16:10][bulliver@virgo bulliver]$ free -m Those that actually read the output of free may notice a contradiction here: The reason why I have such a ridiculous amount of swap on the server, it's because I have an old quantum fireball that has served me well for many years. I didn't have the heart to retire it...so it will spend the rest of its days as a dedicated swap HDD on my server :) |
I didn't give that thing its name, and I didn't create
the swap-sapce, but have a look at this anyway ;) Code:
Cheers, Tink |
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Now, I must confess that in addition to Mandrake 10 with KDE, sendmail, mySQL, and Apache running I also have VMWare with two different Windows installations running as well. Works out pretty handy; I am doing some web integration development and I have an entire network running in this one box. |
The whole RAM x 1.5 = swap thing doesn't work, because that means someone with one GB of ram would have a total of 2.5GB memory to use, while someone with 128MB RAM would have 320MB of memory to use. The way I always do my swap (in Windows and Linux) is 1.5GB - RAM = swap. This means I get a consistent 1.5GB, which is more than I ever need - I don't run many intensive programs/services under Fedora or Gentoo.
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When I installed redhat 9 on my webserver, I gave 500megs of swap space. I think if you are going to remote GUI to it you definitely should go back and re-partition. On the other hand, if you are not using it for high performance computing as in a lab or a server, you probably can get away without it.
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with -6.5GB swap space ;} So what you meant when you say Quote:
I wouldn't recommend your private formula to others, though, but rather try and assess their needs. Cheers, Tink |
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