Christofer C. Bell wrote: > I'd ask you to keep in mind that even "unused swap" (meaning, you do > not expect the system to need to swap) is still useful and valuable. Agreed. > Sometimes processes ask for more memory than is available in the > system. The kernel will not allow the process to run unless there's > sufficient virtual memory to fulfill the request, even if the swap is > never used. That depends upon the Linux kernel setting of vm.overcommit_memory. I have ranted about this on a number of occasions. But the Linux kernel default is to overcommit. In which case swap is not used in the traditional way. Of course that setting isn't sane for serious systems, the OOM killer might kill processes I don't want killed, and so I always set it to not allow overcommit which is the traditional Unix behavior. In which case swap is used in the traditional way. And newly part of the environment is now a /tmp mounted as a tmpfs. That use of tmpfs will probably need swap as a backing store for it. So now swap is doubly important. http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2007/08/msg00022.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2008/04/msg02554.html > I just want to make sure you're aware of the consequences of not > configuring any swap space even if you do not anticipate the system > will ever need to actually page out to it. Agreed. Bob
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