Re: [gentoo-user] Re: More memory?

[Simon Windsor]

Hi

SWAP is not necessarily a bad thing. It is mealy a simple way of moving
unused code from memory so that it can be better used, ie disk caching.

Swap can be bad if you have insufficient memory to run your processes.

If your system has lots of disk activity, the OS will assign memory to
cache the disk. This may where you memory is going.

You say that your system is using perl. What else? Apache? MySQL/PgSQL?
etc ...

Please more info ..

All the best

Simon

On Fri, 2004-12-03 at 20:45 -0600, Gabriel M. Beddingfield wrote:
> Grant wrote:
>
> >> If you don't want it to swap try 'man swapoff' and 'man fstab'
> >
> > It seems like swap is there for a reason so I don't want to disable
> > it.  What I do want to be able to do is run my system in a manner that
> [snip]
>
> Just turn it off.  You don't need it unless you run out of RAM.  Swap is
> just for "virtual RAM."  You don't *need* virtual RAM unless you run out of
> physical RAM.
>
> You may still need 2GB RAM in the future... but turning off swap won't hurt
> anything.  Using 'swapoff' and 'swapon' will let you try-before-you-buy.
> Editing fstab (comment out the line with the swap partition) will make it
> so for every boot-up.
>
> What happens when you run out of RAM?  The application doesn't start up.  It
> doesn't crash the system.  Once when attempting a Gentoo install on a 486 I
> ran out of memory when using tar.  I didn't crash, it just didn't untar my
> file.  I turned on swap, and everything worked just fine.
>
-- 
Simon Windsor

Eml: simon.windsor@×××××××××××××.uk
Tel: [phone]
Mob: [phone]


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