Re: RAM economy tips
On Fri, Apr 20, 2001 at 11:35:46AM -0400, Noah L. Meyerhans wrote:
...
| The thing is, just because some swap space is used, that doesn't mean
| that the pages aren't also in physical RAM. Linux is actually very good
| about keeping things efficient, and you certainly don't need to reboot
| to continue working. Pages that haven't been accessed in some time are
| swapped out, but they're still cached in RAM. So if those pages are
| needed, they're in RAM and you're all set. But if they're needed by
| another app, then they can just be re-allocated. They've already been
| swapped out, so when the new app needs to alocate memory, you don't have
| a lot of swapping going on, just a lot of paging.
That's a good point I never thought about before. Some people (ie
Linus) are smarter than me ;-). That's why he writes the kernel :-).
I used to have RH6.1, then 7.0 on a PII with 64MB real RAM. I had
128MB swap space. My real memory was almost always completely used,
and a little swap used. The machine never dragged, unless I was
rebuilding GTK+ and Glib or something major like that. (Or unless I
ran gaim for many hours -- it has a gradual memory leak) I would have
the system up for weeks too without problems.
-D
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