Re: Swap vs No Swap.

From: James A Sutherland (jas88@cam.ac.uk)
Date: Thu Nov 22 2001 - 11:08:57 EST


On Thursday 22 November 2001 4:00 pm, war wrote:
> Incorrect, my point is I have enough ram where I am not going to run out
> for the things I do.

There's more to it than "not run out". You have some fixed amount of RAM; if
the VM is working properly, adding swap will IMPROVE performance, because
that fixed amount of RAM is used more efficiently.

Obviously, there are cases where removing swap breaks the system entirely,
but even in other cases, adding swap should *never* degrade performance. (In
theory, anyway; in practice, it still needs tuning...)

> Using swap simply slows the system down!

In which case, the VM isn't working properly; it SHOULD page out infrequently
used data to make more room for caching frequently used files.

James.
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