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