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This is a really good point. I think the bar should be set at max performance for systems that never need to use the swap device. If someone wants to tune swap performance to their hearts content, so be it. But given cheap prices for memory, and the horrible best case performance for swap, an increase in swap performance should never, ever come at the expense of performance for a system that has been sized such that executable address spaces, libraries and anonymous memory will fit easily within physical ram. This of course doesn't address the VM paging storms that happen due to large amounts of file system writes. Once the pagecache fills up, dirty pages must be evicted from the pagecache so that new pages can be added to the pagecache. --Buddy -----Original Message----- From: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org [mailto:linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org] On Behalf Of Anthony DiSante Sent: Tuesday, May 25, 2004 11:38 PM To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: why swap at all? As a general question about ram/swap and relating to some of the issues in this thread: ~500 megs cached yet 2.6.5 goes into swap hell Consider this: I have a desktop system with 256MB ram, so I make a 256MB swap partition. So I have 512MB "memory" and if some process wants more, too bad, there is no more. Now I buy another 256MB of ram, so I have 512MB of real memory. Why not just disable my swap completely now? I won't have increased my memory's size at all, but won't I have increased its performance lots? Or, to make it more appealing, say I initially had 512MB ram and now I have 1GB. Wouldn't I much rather not use swap at all anymore, in this case, on my desktop? -Anthony http://nodivisions.com/ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/ | ||||||||||||
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