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) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org