Tom Hudak <thudak at sistina.com> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Aug 14, 2001 at 09:14:32PM -0500, Bob Tanner wrote:
> >I got 512Mb RAM and 1.0Gb of swap. So I doubt it.
> GAH!!!! Get rid of that much swap!!! with 512 Meg of ram you shouldn't
> even touch the swap! (Remember, the whole idea behind it is that RAM was
> expensive, much more so that disk space for equivalent sizes so dump
> some stuff that was intended for RAM to disk when it's not a high
> priority etc.)

There's no reason I see to get rid of the swap.  Linux has been showing
some poor out-of-memory behaviors lately anyway, so the more swap the
better, IMHO.

Certainly, swap isn't there to be used as RAM, but if you have plenty of
processes that don't need to be always active (or only parts of them are
active), swap is a great benefit.  If you're away from the computer, not
using the web browser, then it's perfectly legitimate to expect it to get
swapped out so a compile going in the background can use more real memory.

I know Linux can be pretty aggressive about pushing things into swap
sometimes (buffers/cache forcing things to swap, for example), but many of
the parameters governing that behavior can be modified in /proc/sys/vm
(and maybe elsewhere).

-- 
 _  _  _  _ _  ___    _ _  _  ___ _ _  __   I have doobie in my funk 
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[ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ]
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