2009/1/12 Larry Stotler <larrystotler@gmail.com>:
On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 3:02 PM, Matt Sealey <matt@genesi-usa.com> wrote:
If you have 4GB or 8GB of memory it is nothing to care about, but users put in this memory to run applications, not to provide space for 50 boot services which sit idle, most of which are only there to provide people with large amounts of memory to get things done quicker. This is not very friendly to those who run in more constrained environments. I'm not looking for GNOME etc. to run in 128MB (although in 10.3 it did, and I had enough memory left to run applications before swapping) but reducing the memory footprint of the basic install would be awesome.
Linux does not swap!!! It's a demand paged virtual memory system. Those "idle" processes, will relinquish their clean pages, to be re-read in on demand by page faults from disk, and anonymous dirty pages can be saved in the (misnamed) swap space by the VM. Unfortunately the value of "swappiness" set, seems to be 60, which according to my tests appears too low, so that even on a 512MiB system, swap space is generally unused, for typical "netbook" like usage. Increasing the value to 95 or 100, did get some pages written to the swap space, thus increasing the memory available for applications and kernel caches.
This is the same problem that windows has. Too many apps think they are the most important thing you'll never use.
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