>> 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
OK, how about I enable a 512MB swap file and keep an eye on it. As long as I'm not using more than 200MB, I'm not suffering from disk swap slowdown, right? - Grant
