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Claudio Roberto França Pereira wrote: |
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> I've run my box with 2x2GB of RAM for a while, but a couple weeks ago |
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> one of my chips died, and now I'm stuck with 1x2GB. That's not that |
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> terrible, I'm using Gentoo all day, rarely switching to Windows 7 |
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> anyways, who really likes RAM. |
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> Anyway, for the last days, my machine has been really slow, with mouse |
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> lag, input delay, and other things. I imediately associated it to the |
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> lack of free RAM, but I always rushed to check the RAM usage with htop |
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> and it were never really high. So today I decided to turn my swap |
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> partition off. And the system is FLYING. I mean, it's pratically a new |
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> machine, now it's usable and reliable. |
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> |
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> I thought of falling back from KDE 4 to awesome (tried it earlier in |
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> an old notebook last year) given the memory footprint of KDE, but it |
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> seems that my hard disk was the culprit here. |
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> I've heard that Linux need a little swap partition, maybe just 512MB, |
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> for some tasks, but I'm not going to turn it on anytime soon. It's a |
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> desktop machine, 24/7, and I couldn't care less about suspend-to-disk. |
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> |
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> So, should I ban swap partitions entirely from my life? Is that ok? |
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> |
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> |
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You may want to adjust how swap is being used. I have swap but only |
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want it used to prevent a lockup or some other bad situation. I have |
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this in /etc/sysctl.conf: |
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vm.swappiness = 20 |
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With a setting of 20, it will use swap but only when it is out of ram. |
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I have 16Gbs of ram in my rig and I wouldn't run it without at least a |
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little swap. Why? Well not long ago I did a update. One of the KDE |
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programs got updated and I was still logged in. It wasn't happy and |
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starting eating ram like a cookie monster. That one program was using |
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over 14Gbs and growing. I was able to kill it before things got to bad |
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but even with 16Gbs of ram and swap, it was dog slow. Another minute or |
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two, it may have locked me out. |
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I would recommend having swap and just setting it to use it when ram |
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fills up. I would also replace that stick when I could too. ;-) |
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Dale |
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:-) :-) |
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-- |
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I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words! |
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|
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Miss the compile output? Hint: |
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EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS="--quiet-build=n" |
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