On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 5:13 PM, William Kenworthy <bi...@iinet.net.au> wrote: > On Sun, 2011-01-16 at 14:41 -0800, Grant wrote: >> >> I've been running without swap for quite a while, but my system goes >> >> into a near freeze whenever I undertake a large emerge such as >> >> chromium or openoffice. Is there anything I can do to prevent this >> >> besides turning swap back on? I have 3GB RAM and MAKEOPTS="-j1". >> >> >> >> - Grant >> >> >> >> >> > >> > As Volker says, don't turn swap off. Make it small if you must, but >> > keep some around. It's just disk space. >> >> I thought swap was no longer necessary on a machine with sufficient >> memory. I guess I took I some bad advice a while back. > > The answer is that you have insufficient memory when emerging - hence > swap is necessary - turn it on! ionice will help, but it is alleviating > symptoms of lack of swap, not curing it. Downside in this case is > slower emerges and some will still be flaky. >
I think that's well worded. He has insufficient memory when emerging. If he's really running short of DRAM Then he might also do well to boot to a console and do his emerges there. No memory given over to other things like KDE or browsers, etc. I am a bit surprised though that a -j1 type emerge would be running out of memory on a 3GB machine. I just finished emerge updates on a desktop with 4GB and only used 2.5GB which includes KDE, FIrefox and a number of other things: mark@firefly ~ $ top top - 17:24:12 up 1:58, 3 users, load average: 1.01, 1.03, 0.91 Tasks: 121 total, 1 running, 120 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 1.0%us, 0.6%sy, 0.0%ni, 98.4%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Mem: 3851008k total, 2466316k used, 1384692k free, 351200k buffers Swap: 8393924k total, 0k used, 8393924k free, 1316212k cached - Mark
