hi guys

my 1st post on this site.oh man this site is awesome.i appreciate and congratulate all the members and users for bringing such a wonderful site . im not a particularly newbie of linx (i lovingly call linux) but its more of a on-off relationship with tux. Well nonetheless heres my problem.

i installed Mandriva 2006 and i find it the most complete distro ever. i created 3 partitions namely swap(1 GB), root(4 GB) and home(11 GB) on my 15 GB disk. the problem here is the swap partition appears to be almost useless coz when i run ksysguard i almost find zero activity in it while the cpu load and physical ram are busy. it shud be noted here ive 1 GB physical ram installed. also the system is crashing during logoff or reboot sayin KDE kicker has failed and the system appears to be slow at times.

has anybody had the same problem?? lemme know the solution guys. thnx

once again i must say A GREAT SITE

THUMBS UP!!

Since you have 1gb of RAM installed on the machine, it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that your swap space isn't being touched. Most real-world uses of a machine will typically not encroach into swap space when you have that much RAM installed on a machine.

Aside from that, you really don't WANT swap space to be used if you can help it. Why, you might be asking yourself? Because it is SLOW! Tremendously slow compared to physical memory.

Basically, having swap around allows you to load up more things at any given time to be used at once. If it weren't there, then if you started a program and there wasn't enough memory available it would crash with an error stating it had run out of memory.

I currently operate a cluster with over 200 compute nodes, each node with 4gb of RAM. During our initial testing we would do performance tests against the memory and swap space, and the moment a process started swapping out, performance went down the drain.

Since you have 1gb of RAM installed, I have to assume that you have a pretty decent system as well. You probably do not need that much swap available, and you could probably remove the swap partition, create a 256mb swap partition, and be just as happy.

Yeah mate u got meh right. ive a high end machine and as per ur suggestion ill remove it ans set it to 256. Lemme see what comes off.

thanks

Ive had some problems with Kicker and Klipper too . Theres a post below on this a couple of days ago .
Open and check the setting of Kat too as mine was set to full bore when I installed and it uses all the resources .

Attempted add new ODIN distro to my #x boot machine. Q1. Why would it want 4GB, other than 2xRAM? Please look @ my threads, more info.
I now understand Swap should be avoided, performance reasons.
1st part of HD has better R/W MBs than the tail end, is that why new openSuse install & every other I ever tried, put it as 1st part?
I relocated to early in Ext part.
Q3. Would a small SWAP 256MB be OK on my LT?
Q4. Shareable by any other distro I install?