Re: purging swap disk
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Brian Stults wrote:
>Is there a way to purge the swap disk? When I run something like
>win4lin, it can sometimes take up a lot of disk swap. When I close the
>program, the swap space still appears to be occupied. It's mostly an
>annoyance, and probably doesn't affect anything. However, it seems that
>perhaps it would be better to remove it from disk swap since the next
>time the program runs there may be room for the information in the
>faster RAM memory. Does that make any sense? Even if it doesn't I
>would still be interested to know if there is a way to purge the swap
>disk. It just nags at me to see all that space being used when nothing
>is running. I know, that's probably dumb.
Depends on the kernel version you're using. If you're using a 2.4 kernel
older than 2.4.10, that's the behavior to expect (in servers, you'll
need lots of disk space just for swap use when you're using older 2.4
kernels. It's in the VM implemented by the kernel). For newer 2.4 kernels
swap behaves like additional memory (and is better compared with the
older 2.4 kernels). Dr. Moshe Bar wrote a great article on this some
months ago, and he explained it quite well.
Don't get rid of the swap disk. Even though you have a large amount of
RAM, you'll still need the swap disk. I can't explain it fully (I leave
that to the other older members of this list for a good practical
explanation, or OS books for a discussion re VM theory), except that
the kernel commits some processes to disk so that other processes may
have their share of CPU time, and that you'll need the swap space for
that. And if you'll be using a time-sharing OS (such as Linux) on a
production environment, chances are it would have to use swap space too.
Anyway, to turn off the swap disk, pls check man swapoff.
Paolo Alexis Falcone
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