On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 2:41 PM, Grant <[email protected]> wrote: >>> I've been running without swap for quite a while, but my system goes >>> into a near freeze whenever I undertake a large emerge such as >>> chromium or openoffice. Is there anything I can do to prevent this >>> besides turning swap back on? I have 3GB RAM and MAKEOPTS="-j1". >>> >>> - Grant >>> >>> >> >> As Volker says, don't turn swap off. Make it small if you must, but >> keep some around. It's just disk space. > > I thought swap was no longer necessary on a machine with sufficient > memory. I guess I took I some bad advice a while back. >
I think the idea is never use swap if possible, but in a case where you don't have swap space or run out of swap space I think it's still possible to lose data. I no longer double memory in swap. In the old days I did that. On this server I have 24GB or memory. It seems silly to chew up 50GB of disk space for something that almost never gets touched. If I see this machine swapping I turn something off, but I'm the only user and here to watch what it's doing. <SNIP> >> You don't say what sort of processor this machine has, nor what sort >> of hard drives. Even on a very high-end machine I saw the symptoms you >> report when I tried a 4K sector WD Green drive with the partitions >> misaligned. Once properly aligned the machine worked as expected. > > It's a laptop with a dual-core 2.2ghz CPU. > So -j1 is pretty safe. That's what I was wondering... <SNIP> > > 'onice -c 3 emerge -DuN world' ended up working great. > > - Grant Yeah, I saw the response that got you there. Good info and good to know it works. Cheers, Mark
