Re: Running GNOME with 128 MB RAM - Painfully slow?
Tech Geek put forth on 4/5/2010 11:36 AM:
> Hi,
>
> So I did get a chance to add swap to my system and guess what it made a
> significant difference. I had two instances of iceweasel, one instance of
> gedit, 3 gnome-terminal window open and the system is still running pretty
> decently. I know there is always the debate between how much Swap is
> sufficient - for my purpose, first I added 256 MB of swap file on the
> installation partition and then I reduced to 128 MB of swap and the system
> was still responsive. I don't know how far low I can go but for now it looks
> it will do the trick. I am so relieved that swap solution worked out pretty
> fine. I did not want to move to another distro because I like Debian a lot!
Glad to hear it's working better for you now.
> I wonder if there is a way by which the swap dynamically grows in size as an
> when required?
Swap use is dynamic, exactly as you describe. What isn't dynamic is the
on-disk structure in which the kernel stores the swapped pages. AFAIK, that
must be statically defined in terms of size either for swap partitions or
swap files. Disk space is so cheap, and swap space is such a small fraction
of modern disks, that the coding effort is not anywhere near any payoff
achieved with truly dynamic sized swap structures.
--
Stan
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