What is the swap for?

KMcD · 10-06-2005, 04:46 AM

on my auld dell paperweight (512MB ram) it swaps out like crazy one I have Firefox, Kate, Kile and Kontact running. My laptop rarely swaps unless I use REDUCE alongisde the progs I've listed above.

syg00 · 10-06-2005, 06:05 AM

Some crazy puppy somewhere (kerneltrap probably) a while ago suggested going and buying a truckload of ram.
Then make some ramdisks, and use them for swap ....

Actually makes some sense - if you ignore the small issue of just using that memory and forgetting all about swapping.

Not real good for suspend2 either once you turn the thing off ...

weimond · 10-07-2005, 01:25 PM

i know u must have at least two partitions. but is there any way to give 0 size for swap partition? i have 1gb ram and i've given slack about 256mb swap. i've opened kile, music player, firefox, terminals all at the same time. and it don't even get near 50% mem usage, never mind the swap space. to me swap is just a waste of precious drive space since i'm running slackware on a 10GB drive.

ringwraith · 10-07-2005, 03:18 PM

Seems like we have to have this conversation periodically. The last I read, Linus still insisted that there was a need for some swap. He indicated the kernel needed it to be truly happy. If you are interested in the details and reasoning, I suggest you search the kernel mailing list. I saved it somewhere but don't have the energy to look for it right now. You can also probably find the link by searching this forum.

Tinkster · 10-09-2005, 04:59 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by raska
maybe not even with an Oracle instance running lol

we have in the office a SAP / Oracle system with 4 GB RAM (11 GB of swap configured) in unix solaris with around 100 active users and never swaps a bit

From our development system:

Code:

# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       8203220    8180184      23036          0      26628    6145260
-/+ buffers/cache:    2008296    6194924
Swap:     16578752     378876   16199876

Cheers,
Tink