Re: swap

[Douglas Allan Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca>]

On Tue, May 08, 2007 at 04:12:22PM +0200, Joe Hart wrote:
> Celejar wrote:
> > On Mon, 7 May 2007 12:15:31 -0400
> > Douglas Allan Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca> wrote:
> [snip]
> >> intelectual exercise; I went from a 486 with 32 MB swap to an Athlon
> >> with 1GB in a single bound.  That Xorg makes _that_ swap really burns me
> >> up.
> > 
> > Xorg swaps with a GB? I run Xfce with 512MB and I rarely see swapping;
> > even on my 196MB machine I didn't see much swapping. What else are you
> > running besides X?
> > 
> I have to concur.  I have 1GB and never see any swapping.  I was
> actually contemplating removing the swap, but decided to leave it
> because disk space is cheap.  On another machine that only has 256MB of
> ram, it does occasionally use some swap space, but even on that machine
> it is rare.
> 
> I run several apps at the same time.  Currently there are 105 processes
> running, although most are sleeping according to top.

Are you on i386 or amd64?  I'm wondering how memory gets packed when
things are 64-bit instead of 32-bit; do some things take twice as much
memory?

The only time I see swap is with an X browser.  Doesn't matter Konq,
Mozilla/galeon/whatever.  link2 is OK.  

In fact, it was poor browser performance (read inability to view some
sites) that was the drive to buy my new box.  For everything else, my
IBM 486 was more than adequate.  It annoyed me that I had to buy a new
box to do something as simple as look at a weather map or satelite photo
but onwards and upwards...

Thanks,

Doug.