On Sun, 16 Sep 2001, Federico Sevilla III wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I remember somebody (was it Orly?) who said that with the 2.4 kernels, you
> should either have swap space worth three times the physical memory, or
> none at all. Would anyone care to validate or counter this? Or maybe point
> me somewhere to read up about it?
>
> When I set up my computer I didn't know about this, so I have 512MB RAM
> and 1GB swap space. I'm wondering if I can/should just remove the swap and
> use that space somewhere. Why? I noticed that for some reason, my swap
> always gets used:
>
> $ free -m
> total used free shared buffers cached
> Mem: 500 491 8 0 2 376
> -/+ buffers/cache: 112 387
> Swap: 972 116 855
>
> However, when I check my memory stats using phpSysInfo, only 50MB of my
> physical memory is being used. Does this mean that the rest is used by
> buffers/cache?
>
> This box is fairly multi-tasking. I use it personally as my workstation,
> and run StarOffice, Opera, Pine, LICQ, and some others. As a server it has
> Samba, NFS, NTP, PostgreSQL, Apache, Apache-SSL, Postfix, and Courier
> IMAP.
>
> I -think- that 512MB is pretty sufficient, but will probaby upgrade to 1GB
> when we can afford it. But I don't like applications swapping out. With
> RAID5 the performance hit is significant. I'd also like to be able to use
> that 1GB for ... more ISOs. ;>
>
That behaviour is consistent with linux 2.4 kernels. I remember reading
about that same complaint you have, and the only answer to that was the VM
layer of the kernel is much more aggressive wrt taking out pages in memory
that are seldom accessed, so you've got used swap areas.
The AC series of alan is trying to address that but to date, there seems
to be no other recourse but to drop down to 2.2 or (urk!) 2.0 which does
not swap out that aggressively.
_
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