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On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 5:11 PM, Claudio Roberto França Pereira |
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<spideybr@×××××.com> wrote: |
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> Sorry for being so general, for not giving any real info. I'm new to |
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> system monitoring, I just learnt about iostat and swapon -s, now about |
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> vmstat. I mainly tried to catch anything unusual in top/htop. |
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> |
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> Trying to be more specifically, my system is a core 2 duo, dual core |
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> 3ghz processor, 4gb of ram (now 2gb), ATI radeon HD4850 with 512mb of |
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> vram. I used to play a lot on this box, now a lot less. On Gentoo, |
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> when I play is some browser game or cowsay (it's in games-misc!), not |
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> anything relevant. I'm using radeon open source drivers, by the way. |
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> My main use, currently, is web surfing, firefox with LOTS of tabs, |
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> email, social networks and random browsing. Firefox alone uses lots of |
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> ram, almost always it's using more than a half GB, sometimes it passes |
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> the 1gb mark. I also do Qt develop on this, but nothing heavy. No |
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> virtual machines, no 3d rendering, no heavy processing, no |
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> hibernation. |
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> |
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> So, I'm just a basic common web surfer. In this case, can I say it's |
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> at least SAFE to disable swap? I'll look into "last month's" thread on |
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> this. |
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> |
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|
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Safe to disable, sure. "swapoff" your device(s) and see how it goes. |
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If you start to get out-of-memory errors, you know you've made the |
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wrong decision. :) |
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|
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I think general opinion is that swap is slow and kills performance, |
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you want to avoid it happening if at all possible. If you have enough |
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RAM to avoid using it entirely, great. Tuning the sysctl settings like |
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Dale said, while still having swap partition "just in case" is the way |
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I'd go. If the system is swapping all the time, maybe you just need |
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more RAM. |
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|
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While you're looking at recent threads, check the one about ZRAM also. |
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It is a good alternative to (or complement to) disk-based swap, if |
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your normal swap usage is less than the amount of ZRAM you've |
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allocated. |
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|
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Some things, like suspend-to-disk, might require a swap device |
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on-disk. I have never used that feature myself, so I'm not familiar |
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with the details. |