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On Tuesday 13 March 2007 09:09:06 P.V.Anthony wrote: |
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> |
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> Is swap really needed when there is a 4g of ram? |
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Yes. |
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That assumes that you will be compiling lots of large programs such as |
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mozilla-firefox and Open Office. Let me tell you about my case: |
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I have 4 GB RAM and 2 x Opteron 246 CPUs, and I have three 2GB swap |
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parttions: one each on 2 x IDE and 1 x SATA disks. I've told portage to use |
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the /tmp directory for its work, and /tmp is mounted on tmpfs with a size |
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of 6.5 GB. If /tmp occupancy outgrows the physical RAM, the kernel swaps |
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part of it out to disk and carries on. Magic! |
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I run top in an X terminal when I want to monitor swap use. It shows me that |
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the only time the swap gets used is when I'm compiling one of those large |
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packages. Open Office, in particular, uses up to 5.7 GB of temporary space |
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on my box, which is why I've set the /tmp limit to 6.5 GB. It may actually |
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use more, but that's the most I've observed. |
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This box also spends nearly all its cycles on BOINC projects |
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(http://boinc.berkeley.edu/), which not only ramps up the temp and noise, |
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but of course uses a fair amount of space. All the same, I still don't see |
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any use of swap except on those prodigious compiling jobs. |
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So, if you don't intend to compile large packages, you probably don't need |
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swap; if you do, you do. |
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HTH. |
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-- |
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Rgds |
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Peter Humphrey |
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Linux Counter 5290, Aug 93 |
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-- |
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gentoo-amd64@g.o mailing list |
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