There's another reason to have swap that I don't recall having stumbled across in this thread, though it's quite possible I missed it.
Suppose you have an application that makes a memory reservation, a large memory reservation.. Enterprise databases and some CAD or EDA programs have been known to do this. In such cases, it makes more sense to make the reservation into swap virtual memory than into physical memory because the resident set size of what it *actually* uses will end up being significantly smaller due to factors such as mmap'd files or anonymous segments, shared libraries, shared memory segments, and other variables. Some OS's are smart enough to make the reservations into swap (I would hope all modern OS's would, but I certainly couldn't guarantee it without more research). _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
