On Fri, Apr 20, 2001 at 11:35:46AM -0400, Noah L. Meyerhans wrote: ... | The thing is, just because some swap space is used, that doesn't mean | that the pages aren't also in physical RAM. Linux is actually very good | about keeping things efficient, and you certainly don't need to reboot | to continue working. Pages that haven't been accessed in some time are | swapped out, but they're still cached in RAM. So if those pages are | needed, they're in RAM and you're all set. But if they're needed by | another app, then they can just be re-allocated. They've already been | swapped out, so when the new app needs to alocate memory, you don't have | a lot of swapping going on, just a lot of paging.
That's a good point I never thought about before. Some people (ie Linus) are smarter than me ;-). That's why he writes the kernel :-). I used to have RH6.1, then 7.0 on a PII with 64MB real RAM. I had 128MB swap space. My real memory was almost always completely used, and a little swap used. The machine never dragged, unless I was rebuilding GTK+ and Glib or something major like that. (Or unless I ran gaim for many hours -- it has a gradual memory leak) I would have the system up for weeks too without problems. -D