kelsey hudson wrote:
Having a lot of physical memory is definitely important, but having an appropriately-sized swap file or device is equally important. Swapping is almost a necessity in a modern system. It's no longer a way to get stale pages out of memory, but in a lot of cases, a very important way to get contiguous blocks of free memory back. Memory fragmentation can be a big problem, no matter how much physical RAM you have. If you have
How is memory fragmentation a problem when memory is random access? Lately I have taken to running machines with no swap at all because it is better to have a process which is spinning out of control die than to have the machine swap itself to death and require someone to put their hands on the machine to reboot it (or, a better case, get on the xen virtual console). Haven't had any problems at all running without swap and it has saved us a few times. Disks are still so slow compared to the size of both disks and RAM these days that if you are swapping even 512M of working set you are in real trouble usually.
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