Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3139 mails)

[Randall R Schulz <rschulz@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hans,

On Sunday 08 October 2006 15:03, Hans Witvliet wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-10-06 at 08:16 +0200, Hans du Plooy wrote:
> > Reason I'm asking is that I want to get suspend (to ram and to
> > disc) working on my notebook, which has 2GB RAM, so I need at least
> > 2GB swap.
>
> Probably i'm missing something...
> On most systems i encounter, much of the memory is used by buffers or
> cache.
>
> What's the point of writing that info back to a swap partition, (as
> it is already somewhere on disk anyhow)

Any data in RAM that is associated with a file block will be, if dirty, 
written to that disk block before that RAM is reassigned to some other 
use. If the RAM in question is not dirty (exists already on disk 
identically to what is in memory), then the existing contents are 
simply abandoned and the RAM cleared and reassigned to the new use.

So if a block of RAM holds a file block, it will not be sent to swap. 
Swap is used only for RAM contents that are not backed by an existing 
disk block. That mostly means running program data.


> Hans


Randall Schulz