Jonathan Arnold wrote:
David C. Rankin wrote:
David C. Rankin wrote:
Carlos E. R. wrote:
The Thursday 2007-09-20 at 06:41 -0500, David C. Rankin wrote:
Ok,
Now I'm confused... After all of the discussion about ram size/swap
size, I decided to try and make my 1G Toshiba P35 laptop start swapping
stuff to the swap file.
I opened everything I could think of, 4 konsoles, 2 Open Office files,
3 Gimps, 2 Firefox, 2 Kongueror, Kjot, knotes, ksnapshot, kstars,
Amarok, Thunderbird and several more, but the memory required, as shown
by top, *never* exceeded 1G. The more I would open, the more slight
slowness would occur, but I *always* had 13k - 15k of memory left and
*nothing* was ever written to the swap file.
It probably was taken from the memory used for buffers. The command
'swapon -s' will also tell you the used swap and where.
Just suspend the machine to disk, and get back: you will see that many
things will remain swaped out. The computer is slow right after waking up,
because needed things are not in ram and have to be read from disk. After
a while, it is faster than before because it has got ridden himself of
useless chunks in memory that has ben swapped out.
[root Rankin-P35a:/home/david] # swapon -s
Filename Type Size Used Priority
/dev/hda5 partition 2104472 0 -1
What is strange is that man swapon says -s is equivalent to cat
/proc/swaps. I do not have a /proc/swaps to be found. Hmm.. Thoughts?
Let me correct that. I do have a swaps it has the permissions:
[root Rankin-P35a:/home/david] # ll /proc/swaps
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 2007-09-20 07:33 /proc/swaps
The permission would seem to prevent writing to swap. What should the
permissions for swap be?
Your normal user wouldn't write to it anyway. It's just a special informational
file (like most if not all the files found in /proc), it isn't the actual swap
file.
The actual swap partition is specified in the /etc/fstab file.
The /proc directory is really a reflection of kernel data structures.
They are not real files and directories. Through the magic of VFS,
system calls to these files and directories invoke routines that read
the current kernel data. Under /proc/sys, there are nodes that are
tunable kernel parameters, and these do have write permission. Many
commands, such as ps, top, lsmod, vmstat, and others, retrieve their
data from /proc. This approach avoids the proliferation of system calls,
by using VFS and pseudo filesystems.
Bill Anderson
WW7BA
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