Re: Poor performance with 1GB of RAM
Monday 11 of August 2003 16:29 je &e pisal:
>On Mon, 11 Aug 2003 15:10:45 +0100
>
>Antony Gelberg <antony@antgel.co.uk> wrote:
>> On Mon, Aug 11, 2003 at 01:47:17PM +0200, Nejko Zidarjev wrote:
>> Aside from that, why do you have a 2GB swapfile anyway, as you don't
>> appear to even be close to using all of your physical RAM?
>
> I'm sure you know all this, Antony, I'm writing this for Nejko's (and
>other reader's) edification.
>
> On a personal machine the old rule of thumb of 2xRAM for swap kind of
>breaks when one gets close to or over 512Mb RAM. Right now I am running
> KDE, decoding from some binaries groups with Pan, writing this message in
> Sylpheed, have a few rxvt terminals open and browsing web pages in Opera.
> This machine also run my Samba host, Apache, Apace-SSL, Bind, ProFTPd, a
> dedicated Counter-Strike server and a slew of other things I don't recall
> off the top of my head. Oh, I also carved off some memory for /tmp. 80Mb
> of which 1Mb is in use right now. On 640Mb of RAM here's what free shows:
>
>{grey@teleute:~} free
> total used free shared buffers cached
>Mem: 645468 628668 16800 0 62748 261604
>-/+ buffers/cache: 304316 341152
>Swap: 32760 32752 8
>
> Sure I'm using about 1/2 of the RAM for applications and the like but
> 1/2 is essentially free. The 32Mb of swap is most likely things that
> haven't been touched in ages. The 32Mb is a dedicated swap file (not
> partition) for just that purpose.
>
> I'm not concerned because I also have swapd running. It is configured
> to kick in if physical RAM drops under ~100Mb and create a 32Mb Swap file.
> It can make up to 7 before it konks out. I've seen it as high as 5. I
> have such a convoluted way of handling memory because I wanted to keep the
> protection of /tmp not being a part of / but having only 10Mb to play with
> I can afford to carve off tons of drive space for the dedicated task of
> swap. Right now my swap has a range of 32-256 which seems to be adequate
> for my needs. If I ever pushed the machine too hard I can always twiddle
> with swapd's configuration and tune it for a little higher limit.
>
> So once Nejko figures out what is causing his machine to be so slow
>reducing the swap partition to something smaller would definitely be in
> order. With 1Gb of RAM and presuming if it is a personal system I'd advise
> dropping the swap partition completely and going with a small static swap
> file with swapd to create a larger swap space if needed. I know that a
> swap file is slower than a dedicated partition but let's face it, if it is
> a desktop machine if one is hitting swap speed isn't going to be the main
> consideration; not crashing is. All that is needed there is swap to grow
> into to get the machine under control.
I see. I'm pretty new to Debian and all. I've read that a swap partition is
better than the swap file (as in Windoze). I created a 2gig swap partition
because I like to be "prepared". I'm using dialup but hope that I will soon
be using a broadband connection where my computer will become a mail and
maybe also a web server (depend how much will I learn about using Debian in
this period).
I came to realize that I've created an infinite loop with the scripts that
should be run when a dialup connection is made. I corrected this loop and so
far every thing seems to be working with the expected speed (on a 1.6GHz P4).
Question: How do I turn off the swap partition (in a few steps)?
Thanks,
Jernej Zidar
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