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Re: opinions on swap size and usage?



> From: Jeff S Wheeler <jsw@five-elements.com>
> Date: 12 Feb 2002 11:57:22 -0500
> 
> For years I've been configuring my machines with "small" swap spaces, no
> larger than 128MB in most cases, even though most of my systems have
> 512MB - 1GB of memory.  My desktop computer has zero swap, although I
> have more ram than even X + gnome + mozilla + xemacs can use. :-)
> 
> I do this because I think if they need to swap that much, there is
> probably Something Wrong, and all that disk access is just going to make
> the machine unusable.  May as well let it grind to a halt quickly than
> drag it out, I always said.
> 
> Alexis Bory's post earlier today made me think about swap a bit more
> than I usually do.  What do other folks on this list do?  Zero swap?  As
> much swap as physical memory?  More?  Why?  Can you change the swapper's
> priority, and does this help when your machine starts swapping heavily?
> 
> Thanks for the opinions.

Well, I'm not far to agree with you, only that I usually don't have so
much RAM. 

Moreover,  if you  have a  couple of  tens of  megabytes of  swap, the
system can store there unused  memory pages.  Usually, there are a lot
of  waitting or  suspended  processes  and only  a  couple of  running
ones. All those  daemons that are almost never  invoked can be swapped
on disk and some RAM freed for the active processes.

But if you  have more RAM than enough to run  all your active process,
you can very well go with zero swap.


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