On Tuesday 13 March 2007 09:09:06 P.V.Anthony wrote: > > Is swap really needed when there is a 4g of ram?
Yes. That assumes that you will be compiling lots of large programs such as mozilla-firefox and Open Office. Let me tell you about my case: I have 4 GB RAM and 2 x Opteron 246 CPUs, and I have three 2GB swap parttions: one each on 2 x IDE and 1 x SATA disks. I've told portage to use the /tmp directory for its work, and /tmp is mounted on tmpfs with a size of 6.5 GB. If /tmp occupancy outgrows the physical RAM, the kernel swaps part of it out to disk and carries on. Magic! I run top in an X terminal when I want to monitor swap use. It shows me that the only time the swap gets used is when I'm compiling one of those large packages. Open Office, in particular, uses up to 5.7 GB of temporary space on my box, which is why I've set the /tmp limit to 6.5 GB. It may actually use more, but that's the most I've observed. This box also spends nearly all its cycles on BOINC projects (http://boinc.berkeley.edu/), which not only ramps up the temp and noise, but of course uses a fair amount of space. All the same, I still don't see any use of swap except on those prodigious compiling jobs. So, if you don't intend to compile large packages, you probably don't need swap; if you do, you do. HTH. -- Rgds Peter Humphrey Linux Counter 5290, Aug 93 -- gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org mailing list
