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SubjectRe: swap killer kernels


On Mon, 30 Mar 1998, Pavel Machek wrote:
>
> Please keep in mind that there are many uses where there's no
> swap. Ram is pretty cheap these days, and when you have 20 machines
> 32Meg each, lazy option is not to give them any disks. (Also, so-called
> network computers do not have any disks). As we are not able to swap
> over network (well, we are, but with pretty ugly paches), we should
> not depend on swap _too_ much.

Note that if you have plenty of RAM, having no swap is not a problem at
all. I should have made that clear. It is only when you're starting to
press the machine a bit that it starts being beneficial to have swap.

One easy way to determine this is to just temporarily create a small
swapfile, and enabling it. If it doesn't really get used (maybe just a few
hundred kB or so actually ever used in normal operation), there's no point
in having it, and you have "plenty RAM" for what you are doing.

And finally, Linux _will_ work without swap even if you'd need it a bit,
it just won't be as efficient as it should be.

Linus


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