Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (818 mails)

[Per Jessen <per@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Felix Miata wrote:

> On 2011/09/14 16:45 (GMT+0200) Per Jessen composed:
>
> > Felix Miata wrote:
>
> > >  My 24/7 RAID1 system boots with swap enabled, but usually one of
> > >  the first things I do after boot is swapoff -a. Dedicated swap on
> > >  systems with ample RAM seems to me to be an anachronism.
>
> > Not at all.  My server systems have beetween 4G and 16G of memory,
> > all
> > have and all use swap (even if just a tiny bit).  My new office
> > systems have 2Gb and use swap - the older boxes only had 1Gb, and
> > also used swap.
> > If for instance you've got lots of stuff in KDE that you never use (I
> > can count quite a few processes that I have no idea what are for),
> > they end up being swapped out permanently, and the memory is
> > available for the part of the system that I actually use.
>
> The way I remember it, if no dedicated swap partition exists, kernel
> will swap out to /.

No, if your system doesn't have any swap-space (file or partition), no
swapping will happen.

> Right now on my 2.6.31 system referred to above, which has 4G of RAM
> and no swap partition enabled, with 5 web browsers with 100+ tabs open
> among them, and several other X apps open scattered among 6 virtual
> desktops, and Apache running in background, 51% of RAM is consumed by
> cache. I really don't see the point of having dedicated swap
> partition(s) on a typical desktop or laptop system.

The topic was also more about swapping on RAID1, which a typical desktop
or laptop probably doesn't have.  Nonetheless, my workstation also has
4Gb RAM:

Mem:   4054784k total,  2433940k used,  1620844k free,       24k buffers
Swap:  3911736k total,  1465600k used,  2446136k free,  1042500k cached

Like I said, my new typical office systems with 2Gb use swap. Whether it
is a dedicated partition or not, is probably of little significance.


/Per

-- 
Per Jessen, Zürich (19.4°C)

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