Re: Debian Users...

[Andy Firman <andy@firman.us>]

On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 01:19:39PM -0800, Jeff wrote:
> Russell Coker, 2003-Nov-20 04:14 +1100:
> > On Thu, 20 Nov 2003 04:00, Caoilte O'Connor <lists@caoilte.org> wrote:
> > > doesn't fam engage in periodic disk access? i certainly get
> > > a lot less when not using kde despite having 256M RAM.
> > 
> > I was under the impression that the sole point of FAM was to avoid disk 
> > access, it should use the kernel dnotify interface for this.  But even if it 
> > was to repeatedly read a directory this would only cause disk access if you 
> > didn't use the mount option "noatime" (which every laptop user should use).
> > 
> > I have 384M of RAM and swap still gets used when running KDE.
> > 
> > KDE uses lots of CPU time in many instances, loads big executables from disk 
> > with lots of shared objects, and uses plenty of memory which causes swapping.
> > All these things decrease battery life.  Use text mode if you want to get 
> > maximum batter life.
> 
> I got rid of fam altogether.  I didn't feel it was providing enough
> benefit to have it running on my laptop.  KDE is doing just fine
> without it.

After an apt-get upgrade last week, I noticed fam running.
I disabled it as well and I see no ill effects.

> 
> I have 512MB of RAM and shut down swap.  I got tired of all the
> swapping.  This is working very nicely for me.  

What do you mean that you are tired of swapping?

Do you use "top" to see if your machine is using swap?

How do you turn it off?  What is the benefit?

Andy