On Wed, 5 Dec 2007 09:39:44 -0500 Kim Goldenberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> There is an article posted this wee on Linux.com about swap space: > > http://www.linux.com/feature/121916 Humm, very confusing in places and missing a key detail. A lot of stuff isn't swapped. Any page that came from an underlying executable file and has not been written too (ie most of the code of most programs) is simply discarded and re-read from the file system. Thats also usually much faster than swapping it. Bogus claim: "if you run out of memory and have no swap the system will crash". It won't. It'll keep trying to get memory by throwing out stuff which can be thrown out without swap (like code). What it does when this limit is reached depends on your configuration but it may get very very slow (ditto with swap if you run out of swap) or you can tell it to refuse to get into that sort of state and disable overcommit. The commit policy is configurable so you can tune it for a swapless box that wants memory allocations to fail rather than excessive swapping, and various embedded boxes use it. The amount of swap you need really is application dependant. Get rid of evolution and it halves in my experience. Alan ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
