Re: Where did my memory go?

[P Prince <princep@charter.net>]

Hey,

> > Under, say, 128MB of RAM, this makes a lot of sense, but when you go to half
> > and gig and beyond, it becomes less useful.
>
> However, under such situations there is no penalty for swapping.  The
> swapped pages are cached in RAM.  The idea is that the kernel is getting
> a head start just in case it actually *needs* to swap later.  If it
> does, all it has to do is re-allocate memory, rather than swap pages out
> to disk and then re-allocate memory.  If it had to do that, then a
> situation in which some program suddenly tried to allocate memory would
> cause the system to grind to a halt as pages are swapped out.

I didn't realize the swapped pages would still really be in ram, so it always
either helps or doesn't, but never hurts.  Grand :P

-Tech