On 12/30/2002 2:30 PM, someone claiming to be Net Llama! wrote:
On Mon, 30 Dec 2002, Marvin P. Dickens wrote:
On Mon, 30 Dec 2002 13:44:09 -0500
Tim Wunder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
But, what could possibly be *gained*, performance-wise, by turning swap off?
If swap isn't needed, it won't be used...
Linux kernel code and data are not swappable and are never moved to
swap. User code never needs to be written to swap space because it
already exists on disk and can be read in from there if it is required
again. User data is the only data that is written to swap space. Once user
data is in swap, it is read back in when it is needed. If your application
is dependent on swap performance, you need more RAM. This is where you
gain performance. Swap should be viewed as a lightweight background
optimization to make unused pages available for other work, rather
than as a cure for an underprovisioned machine (Which is what swap
has become).
So, the question remains, how does *disabling* swap aid in system performance. Without swap, how does the kernel "make unused pages available for other work"?
...The point was and still is that memory is dirt cheap (For
the price of a crappy usb webcam, you can purchase 256MB of RAM).
I'll agree with you here. So what you're *really* saying is that you should have as much RAM as necessary to render Swap unecessary. But, how does the act of *disabling swap* accomplish this?
THis may all be well & true, however it still doesnt' address the fact
that disabling swap is not a performance enhancement, but rather a
performance degradation.
Which (I thought) was my point...
Enabling or disabling swap seems irrelevant to enhancing system performance. Having enough RAM so that Swap is unneeded, *that's* the performance enhancement, not disabling swap. If a user has slow performance because he's running KDE 3.0.5 with 64 MB RAM, removing his swap space won't help him any.
Tim
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