Re: Query about failure of Debian 6 64 bit to swap properly

[Martin Steigerwald <Martin@lichtvoll.de>]

Am Mittwoch, 29. August 2012 schrieb Bret Busby:
> >> I do hope that Debian 7 implements memory paging, or swapping.
> > 
> > I'm not completely sure what you mean by this :-?
> 
> It seems to have stopped working properly, in about Debian 5, and I
> hope  that Debian 7 gets it working again.
> 
> In Debian 5, I could sometimes kickstart memory swapping, by running 
> something like the GIMP, and opening images, then closing the 
> application, at which stage, memory swapping would sometimes start (on
> a  different computer - Debian 5 would not run on this computer), but
> I have not yet managed to get memory swapping working properly in the
> 64 bit Debian 6. I do not remember whether the memory swapping works
> on the 32 bit installation of Debian 6, on my NX5000 laptop.

Bret, whatever your issues are, I am very sure that it isn´t that Debian 
is anable to swap or page memory.

If you have 8 GiB of RAM and it swaps another 8 GiB it will be slow. And 
thats just physics. Harddisks are slow. Much memory paged to to harddisk 
based swap is slow. Its as easy as that.

So the main question is:

What on earth uses up 16 GiB or memory on your machine?

Solve this and you are likely done with the issue.

I have 8 GiB of RAM and the machine rarely swaps when I have two KDE 
sessions open with a ton of applications and then I have never seen more 
than 2-3 GiB of swap space used. Granted thats with Debian Sid.

Also a ThinkPad T42 with 2 GiB doesn´t swap very much, neither a T23. On 
the T23 since Sarge in each and every Debian release and lots of interim 
package versions since then.

-- 
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
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