Re: zero swap free
Incoming from Alvin Oga:
> On Thu, 22 Jan 2004, David G. Schlecht wrote:
>
> > I'm running Linux v2.2.16 from a Debian distro. The "free" command shows
> > zero bytes of swap free out of 129 Mb (same size as physical mem).
> >
> > The culprit was qpopper when I received a 200Mb e-mail.
> >
> > I once read that the "free" value isn't that important, as long as the
> > system isn't thrashing -- which it's not. If I recollect, the reasoning
> > was that the swap is just rearranged next time someone has to page to disk.
>
> you should avoid using swap ...
Typical MS Windows user's answer. :-P
> if your os runs out of memory ... you'll know.. it'll reboot ( crash,
Outside of Windows, we generally expect systems to just keep on
running, to shutdown gracefully when told to, and to come back up in
one piece with little to no effort on our part. swap is a fairly
inexpensive way to make that happen. With swap, if your system slows
down, close down some apps or go for coffee until some apps finish
what they're doing.
Just letting the machine crash and climb back to life is about the
least elegant way in which the machine can operate. Of course, if you
don't mind data loss, filesystem corruption, or you're only running
games, none of this may be of any importance to you.
--
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
(*) http://www.spots.ab.ca/~keeling
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