Messages in this thread | | | From | Bill Davidsen <> | Subject | Re: why swap at all? | Date | Thu, 03 Jun 2004 09:38:56 -0400 |
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William Lee Irwin III wrote: > On Thu, May 27, 2004 at 08:31:26AM -0400, Piszcz, Justin Michael wrote: > >>If I have 16GB of ram should I use swap? >>Would swap cause the machine to slow down? > > > Yes. You want swap so you can physically relocate anonymous pages in the > rare case one ends up somewhere it could cause memory pressure against > allocations that can only be satisfied by a restricted range of memory.
It would seem that the o/s has enough information to separate pages into categories such as 'part of a program,' 'unwritten user write() data,' 'user read() data sequential," 'user read data random' (read after seek) and the like. It would be nice if admins could do tuning on how the o/s weights giving these memory. The swappiness tuner is certainly a start, in practice it does help with atypical loads.
And Nick's latest stuff against 2.6.7-rc1-mm1 certainly seems to work very well on my little 96MB slow box with a few dozen windows open. I would call it the best I've run on this box, ever.
-- -bill davidsen (davidsen@tmr.com) "The secret to procrastination is to put things off until the last possible moment - but no longer" -me - 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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