Re: why swap is important?
There's always swapd for us lazy folks (it's still best to have a
dedicated swapfs to). That with `and', the auto nice daemon, can be a
life saver for stuff like Netscape when it goes schizophrenic while
you're away from your desk.
And to restate what's been said already, swap is good (but you don't
have to use it, it's your box anyway...). The kernel will swapout
idle pages in favor of disk cache in many situations. AFAICT it's
keeping track of cache hits and misses to (and pageswap hits and
misses) and takes the best performance option overall. (if you read
the same large file 30 times in a 5 minute period, isn't it faster to
keep it cached in memory, and swap out that idle section of something
you're not using right now?).
Do you have to use swap all the time, or at all? - no not really. but
it's a good practice.
--
Scott Edwards
Daxal Communications - http://www.daxal.com
Surf the USA - http://www.surfthe.us
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