Re: running without a swap partition
On Thu, 10 Feb 2000, Marcin Owsiany <porridge@pandora.info.bielsko.pl>
wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 10, 2000 at 10:53:08AM +1100, Daniel Pittman wrote:
>> On Wed, 09 Feb 2000, Christian DeKonink <chrisd@sendmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > Can debian be run without a swap partition?
>>
>> Sure can. It's sensible to provide some sort of swap capability if
>> you can -- otherwise you can get into a position where Linux will be
>> unable to do /anything/ because it ran out of memory. It does not
>> cope well with this (relatively speaking).
>
> Moreover if the RAM you have is sufficent for your needs, then in some
> cases you may notice that a system without swap is faster than the one
> with swap.
This seems unlikely, although once you start to swap currently running
tasks you will notice a performance loss.
> I had noticed it once on my old desktop p133/8MB RAM. I do not know
> Linux's memory management well enough to say how it copes with too
> little memory, but what i think increases the speed is that when it
> runs short on memory it just squeezes somehow prosesses' needs for
> memory instead of swapping them out.
To the best of my knowledge, this is not the case. I am not a kernel
expert, however, simple an interested onlooker at the source...
Daniel
--
The best work of artists in any age is the work of innocence
liberated by technical knowledge.
-- Nancy Hale
Reply to: