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Richard Freeman <rich@××××××××××××××.net> posted |
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46F53191.8040204@××××××××××××××.net, excerpted below, on Sat, 22 Sep 2007 |
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11:15:29 -0400: |
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|
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> That's Ok, I got a chuckle out of it. You have Duncan who doesn't use |
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> swap at all (I think), |
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|
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I ran entirely without for awhile back when I had a gig of memory, but I |
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turned it back on to allow suspend to disk (aka hibernate), then got the |
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4-way RAID before I upped memory, and set it up for 4x4-gig of striped |
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swap. The kernel will stripe swap automatically when you set swap |
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partitions to the same priority, as I've done here. I didn't setup the |
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swap on top of RAID-0. |
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|
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I do use swap occasionally; the last time was when I recompiled qt-3 I |
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think -- with unlimited jobs and $PORTAGE_TMPDIR on tmpfs! IIRC it ran |
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up 200+ load average (1 minute), used up all 8 gigs memory, and ran 7 |
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gigs into swap, before the system got slow enough it wasn't updating |
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ksysguard any more and I couldn't tell how much worse it got. =8^) |
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|
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I'm glad I was running striped swap or it probably would have been there |
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quite some time, but it ran a nearly frozen GUI for several minutes, then |
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started coming back to life, as I could see the load and memory usage |
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climbing back down. |
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|
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FWIW I'm running the kernel 2.6.23-rcs, which of course have the new CFS |
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CPU scheduler. I wasn't too happy with it originally, as it'd zero out X |
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responsiveness much faster than the old scheduler did, but it has gotten |
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somewhat better as the rcs have progressed. I don't think it's quite |
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where the old one was yet, but if one truly wants "fair", one should |
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expect to play with priorities/niceness a bit more to keep smooth X |
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operation when running 200+ load average and heavy swapping. It's |
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certainly reasonable now; something I couldn't have said back around rc-3 |
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or 4, when I was pretty unhappy with it. I guess we see how good they |
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did when it releases and we see if there's any outcry on people having |
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trouble with X or whatever. |
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|
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Back to swap, striped swap isn't so bad. Running more than 4 gig of |
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single-spindle swap can be a killer tho, as the effects of a multi-gig |
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swap-storm on a slow single-spindle disk setup aren't pretty! =8^( |
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|
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That said, the main reason I run swap now is for suspend-to-disk aka |
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hibernate. It's nice to be able to have the system shut off when I'm at |
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work or sleeping, and turn it back on to have it restore the session as I |
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left it. Unfortunately, it can only use a single swap device for the |
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suspend image, so since I have the 16 gigs spread across 4 disks equally, |
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the max suspend image I can create is 4 gigs, only half of my physical |
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memory size! I'm thinking about layering swap on top of RAID-0 |
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(assembled based on the kernel command line, so before the restore |
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starts) to see if I can avoid that and get a full 8 gig suspend image to |
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match my memory size, plus faster read-in as well, but haven't tried it |
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yet and am not positive it's supported. IOW, the automatic combination |
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of swap partitions into striped swap works for swap, but not for the |
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suspend image, unfortunately, so (if it works) there's still reason to |
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layer swap on RAID-0 after all. |
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|
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-- |
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Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. |
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"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- |
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and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman |
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|
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-- |
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