On Wednesday 13 April 2011, Ben Hutchings wrote: > On Wed, 2011-04-13 at 13:34 +0200, Bernhard R. Link wrote: > > * Philip Hands <p...@hands.com> [110413 12:54]: > > > This strikes me as suboptimal, since one could use the disk space > > > allocated to /tmp as extra swap and then allocate a tmpfs of that size > > > to be mounted on /tmp with no effect other than allowing the system to > > > have access to more swap than it would have otherwise had (of course, > > > that's probably more than it needs, so instead you could just save some > > > disk space that would otherwise be left generally unused by overloading > > > the swap usage with /tmp usage. > > > > > > Therefore, in the multi-partition setup, I think we should also default > > > to having /tmp on tmpfs. > > > > This has both the disadvantage of a system then having swap (given the > > big memory sizes one currently has and the big difference between RAM > > and disk access times, having swap is often quite a disadvantage) > > [...] > > Under Linux, swap space is a requirement to defragment RAM. (This may > change in the future.) Without swap space, the kernel eventually > becomes unable to make large physically-contiguous allocations. Don't > turn it off. > > Ben. I am surprised at this. I have several boxes which are small single board computers with solid state disks (MIDE or CF), so as I did not need swap space (the running set is fixed and the memory requirement was within the total available memory, I did not define any swap space. A few days ago I needed to move one of the boxes I noted its uptime at 594 days just before I switched it off. I grant you that it has 256MB of memory, and 120MB is currently free, but I have not noticed any problems growing over the time it was up. Maybe it just did not need to make any large physically contiguous allocations.
BTW, /var/run is currently occupying a grand total of 27KB if that is relevant to the subject of this thread. David -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/201104131544.37402.david.goodeno...@btconnect.com