On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 11:25 AM, Grant <[email protected]> wrote: > I've been running without swap for quite a while, but my system goes > into a near freeze whenever I undertake a large emerge such as > chromium or openoffice. Is there anything I can do to prevent this > besides turning swap back on? I have 3GB RAM and MAKEOPTS="-j1". > > - Grant > >
As Volker says, don't turn swap off. Make it small if you must, but keep some around. It's just disk space. I doubt swap has anything at all to do with this problem myself, but it will be interesting to hear from others. You don't say what sort of processor this machine has, nor what sort of hard drives. Even on a very high-end machine I saw the symptoms you report when I tried a 4K sector WD Green drive with the partitions misaligned. Once properly aligned the machine worked as expected. If this is a single processor machine and you're in the middle of a big emerge then likely you're just going to lose interactivity. It's the nature of the beast. You could try PORTAGE_NICE= in make.conf and possibly get some relief. Cheers, Mark
