Re: Bullseye default swap partition size?
On Sun 09 Jan 2022 at 10:14:41 (+0000), Tixy wrote:
> On Sat, 2022-01-08 at 14:24 -0600, David Wright wrote:
> [...]
> > the alternative is running out of memory, and the OOM killer.
> > Obviously I don't know what you run that clogs the system. Most of my
> > machines have much less RAM than the two mentioned, though they get
> > less memory-intensive use nowadays. Maybe the difference is that
> > I don't install any DEs here.
>
> I've always used a DE and no swap, at the moment it's using 850MiB of
> RAM running an email program and Firefox with one page open. Opening 10
> tabs in Firefox and a music player to get a realistic higher limit of
> memory usage and it jumps to 1.5GiB. That still leaves several GiB for
> disk caches.
Yes, that's obviously a very busy machine.
I just checked the memory use on this desktop after seeing your post
this morning. It has 22 xterms open in fvwm, and there are two remote
ssh logins from my laptop (whence I woke up this desktop). There are
two mutt instances (one reading, one composing this). That all uses:
top - 09:10:40 up 29 min, 22 users, load average: 0.01, 0.02, 0.00
Tasks: 196 total, 1 running, 195 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 0.2 us, 0.2 sy, 0.0 ni, 99.6 id, 0.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st
MiB Mem : 7921.6 total, 6472.6 free, 560.2 used, 888.8 buff/cache
MiB Swap: 499.0 total, 499.0 free, 0.0 used. 7063.2 avail Mem
as a baseline. Then I launched FF, which puts up a weather forecast
for the week. I closed that, and clicked on Restore Tabs, which
displays the last page from my previous session yesterday:
top - 09:13:55 up 33 min, 22 users, load average: 0.17, 0.14, 0.05
Tasks: 203 total, 1 running, 202 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 0.8 us, 0.0 sy, 0.0 ni, 99.2 id, 0.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st
MiB Mem : 7921.6 total, 5856.2 free, 897.8 used, 1167.7 buff/cache
MiB Swap: 499.0 total, 499.0 free, 0.0 used. 6698.4 avail Mem
I then rotated through the 194 FF tabs, to produce:
top - 09:22:30 up 41 min, 22 users, load average: 1.76, 1.51, 0.78
Tasks: 208 total, 1 running, 207 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 6.2 us, 2.1 sy, 0.0 ni, 75.3 id, 16.4 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st
MiB Mem : 7921.6 total, 1641.6 free, 4750.1 used, 1529.8 buff/cache
MiB Swap: 499.0 total, 499.0 free, 0.0 used. 2737.5 avail Mem
These tabs would mostly be ad and video free, rather than the sites
like newspapers that have multiple videos running (I close those
as soon as I've looked at them).
As you can see, the token swap is untouched, and sits there like a
spare can of petrol in the boot, pretty much whatever normal work
I do. With 6 and 8GB more on two other machines, swap is rather
wasteful, particularly with the SSD one.
To the OP, I would just say that it's impossible for the d-i to
guess which camp you fit into, big swap or small, so if you don't
like what it chooses, you just have to change it yourself. If you
don't do that, then you can always set up a swap /file/ instead.
"Obviously I don't know what you run that clogs the system" (above)
contained a grain of untruth—I know that Cindy Sue uses tabs a lot,
and with different browsers, so I just looked back to find 730+ in
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2018/10/msg00416.html
OTOH I use FF on an old laptop, and limit myself to three tabs.
It has 500GB memory and 1GB swap. It churns like hell, and can
take a minute to open a page. Without swap, it just freezes up.
So on thet, it's essential.
(Both machines running buster, which could well be the Final OS
for the old laptop.)
Cheers,
David.
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