Hey, > > Under, say, 128MB of RAM, this makes a lot of sense, but when you go to half > > and gig and beyond, it becomes less useful. > > However, under such situations there is no penalty for swapping. The > swapped pages are cached in RAM. The idea is that the kernel is getting > a head start just in case it actually *needs* to swap later. If it > does, all it has to do is re-allocate memory, rather than swap pages out > to disk and then re-allocate memory. If it had to do that, then a > situation in which some program suddenly tried to allocate memory would > cause the system to grind to a halt as pages are swapped out.
I didn't realize the swapped pages would still really be in ram, so it always either helps or doesn't, but never hurts. Grand :P -Tech