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DateWed, 26 May 2004 19:58:47 +1000
FromNick Piggin <>
SubjectRe: why swap at all?
Anthony DiSante wrote:
> Nick Piggin wrote:
>
>> The VM doesn't always get it right, and to make matters worse, desktop
>> users don't appreciate their long running jobs finishing earlier, but
>> *hate* having to wait a few seconds for a window to appear if it hasn't
>> been used for 24 hours.
>
>
> Come on, that is quite an exaggeration. It can happen in a span of
> minutes -- after rsyncing a dir to a backup dir, for example, which
> fills ram rather quickly with cache I'll never use again. Or after
> configuring and compiling a package, which does the same thing.
>

rsync is something known to break the VM's use-once heuristics.
I'm looking at that.

> As you said, the VM doesn't, in fact, always get it right. If 512MB
> worked before when it was half swap, 512MB of pure ram will work too,
> only faster. I don't see how adding more swap at that point could
> increase performance unless you are keeping your ram full of non-cached
> pages, and that's never the case for me -- my ram is almost always half
> cached pages.
>

It can.
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