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On Thu, 29 Dec 2011 20:34:16 -0200 |
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Claudio Roberto França Pereira <spideybr@×××××.com> 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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This question comes up about every three months or so, and the end |
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result is always the same: the same people chip in with the same |
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answers and we all come to the same conclusion. |
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You should check the Gentoo archives for the most recent gigantic |
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thread on this, that one was particularly illuminating. |
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But to summarize: |
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You haven't given any real info for people to answer your actual |
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question. To do that, we need to know what exactly your machine is |
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doing and why, please what your swap settings are. |
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Generally, the kernel is happiest with a little bit of swap (512 MB is |
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a very much more than a little) and you can get by with that if your |
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apps fit into ram. KDE is reasonably smart with ram usage, if you only |
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have 2G it will try fit into that. If you have 22G it will try to use |
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lots. |
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If your machine was really slow, it was likely thrashing. But no-one |
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can say for sure - what was your disk doing at the time? What did |
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vmstat say was going on? |
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To summarize a summary, the answer to "can I ban swap?" is "maybe" |
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-- |
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Alan McKinnnon |
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alan.mckinnon@×××××.com |
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