Alan McKinnon wrote: > On Tue, 04 Sep 2012 09:15:31 -0500 > Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> I think the new method for determining swap is to use what makes sense >> and not the old rule of 'twice the ram'. > Alan's new rule of swap is: > > If you ever use swap as swap at all, find out how your machine is > misconfigured. When my 16G is "not enough" anymore, something is badly > wrong and it isn't not enough RAM and I need swap to wiggle around > in :-) > > I think the 2 x RAM rule stopped being applicable when the average > machine got to more than 16M. Some old memes are like zombies - very > hard to kill. > > This laptop has a "swap" partition, but it's not for swap, it's for > hibernate. And I never use it, it takes longer to come out of hibernate > than to just boot up from cold! These days I just suspend. > > None of this changes the fact that the kernel still does get upset when > it has no swap at all (even just a little bit). But that doesn't mean > we should still be using it as full-blown swap. > > >
Yup. I have swap but I have it set to where it won't use it unless it is REALLY bad. I have swappiness set to like 20 or something. It will fill up my ram with cache and such but it rarely uses more than a few hundred kilobytes of swap. When I see it using that, I usually kill swap and add it back. I just don't like a machine with 16Gbs of ram using swap at all. I have thought about setting it to 10. Maybe then it will leave it alone until it really hits the fan. ;-) That said, I did roll over one night and notice that the CPU was going ape. I got up and into my chair to notice it was using almost all the ram and was starting to use a bit of swap. I switched to a console, ran htop and noticed that some KDE process was using about ~15.5Gbs of ram. It was crazy to see. I couldn't get it to die with kill -15 so I did a kill -9. I guess it had to know I really wanted it dead. It has not happened since so no clue on why it did that. Heck, it ran the same version of KDE for a good while and still didn't do it. Cosmic rays from Mars I guess. I would recommend at least 500Mbs or so of swap regardless of ram tho. Some swap is a good idea. Just try not to use it since it is dog slow. If you are using hibernate/suspend thingys then that is different. Isn't that when it has to be at least as much swap as you have ram? Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
