-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On March 25, 2004 10:57, Curtis Sloan wrote: > > I was a bit suprised by it, but I found that on a desktop, I needed a > > huge freaking swapfile. That may well be because I'm a bit of a moron > > when I first get the thing set up, and I emerge a zillion packages at the > > same time. Most of our servers here don't need a swap partition at all > > (thought they all have).
graphic apps put extreme pressure on memory for many reasons, including: o graphics are HUGE, and modern apps tend to use a lot of them o graphic apps tend to be long-run programs that don't reset data segments very often. while a webserver will create a connection, serve a page, and move on, your webbrowser will get a page, render it, display it, and then likely cache it. o desktop apps tend to have a LOT of periphery functions, such as addressbooks for mail apps and bookmark managers for web browsers. server apps tend to be more single purpose and therefore less memory intensive. > Can anyone speak to any of the classic swap file myths (that tend to change > between kernel versions) such as: Linux never uses more than 128M of swap > (which is what I have now, using kernel 2.6)? yes, that's a myth. most UNIXes have a "double the RAM for swap" rule. Linux is more along the lines of "swap == RAM", though for the early 2.4 kernels this wasn't true as the VM was tuned to more of a "double the RAM" mode (and sometimes even worse). with today's RAM-heavy systems sporting 256MB, 512MB, 1GB or more of RAM it is possible to run a system w/out swap at all depending on the workload profile. depending on what you are doing, you may not use swap at all or you may use it heavily. swap is definitely more important on low-RAM systems, since you'll run into high levels of memory pressure quicker on those systems. so these are just "rules of thumb" that require a bit of observation of the system in question. > I've put my desktop system into extreme loads (accidentally) a couple of > times and wondered if my swap size was what it was choking on. I ended up > killing X to restore sanity (sure beats a reboot ;-) but I'd rather not > have to even do that. if you are in a swap storm and give it enough time (e.g. 10-15minutes) the kernel will actually end up sorting this out for you. =) - -- Aaron J. Seigo GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43 while (!horse()); cart(); -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.2-rc1-SuSE (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFAYzsb1rcusafx20MRAg8pAJ9g0sWWDnJ0LthU6qUnpFKCAvDoNgCff9XC W4CzUU+I/OzH80k9j0Hz8hc= =FXyz -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca
