Re: opinions on swap size and usage?
On Tue, Feb 12, 2002 at 11:57:22AM -0500, Jeff S Wheeler wrote:
[...]
> 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.
The main purpose of swap on a system with enough RAM is to hold dead code.
Nearly every program and library has chunks of code and data that is used
only rarely or perhaps just at startup. Having this eat up physical RAM is a
waste, when that RAM could be used to buffer disk.
The other reason is sometimes it is heaps easier to write a quick and dirty
script that creates/loads/manipulates rediculous amounts of data in RAM,
than write some complicated way of manipulating all that data on disk :-)
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
ABO: finger abo@minkirri.apana.org.au for more info, including pgp key
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Reply to: