On 7/21/2011 4:53 PM, Grant wrote:
So swap isn't treated exactly like RAM. It actually has special
handling in Linux which makes it beneficial to have on almost any
Linux system? According to Alan, things get very bad when a Linux
system hits swap. How can behavior like this be beneficial:
"When a linux machine hits swap, it does so very aggressively, there
is nothing nice about it at all. The entire machine slows to a
painstaking crawl for easily a minute at a time while the kernel
writes pages out to disk, and disk is thousands of times slower than
RAM.
It gets so bad that you can't even run a shell properly to try and see
what's going on and kill the actual memory hog."
Also, aren't you likely to wear out your hard disk sooner using swap?
1. swap is good. Unless you have a good reason, leave it there. You do
not have a good reason to remove it and neither does anyone else.
2. Don't use the swap that you have. It's slow. It is not a replacement
for RAM.
3. If you use a little bit of swap, 100-200MB, that's fine. It's also a
sign you need more RAM.
4. If you're using all your RAM and a couple of GB of swap, you're
screwed. Avoid this.
5. Swap that you never write to or read from never needs to hit the
drives. If you're worried about drive wear, turn off logging.
kashani
