[PLUG] Swapless swapfile? (Workstation with 1gb RAM)

[Derek Loree]

"Longman, Bill" wrote:

> > They used to say double your ram for windows swap..
> > Some versions of Win can only use 512 megs or was it 256?
> > 512 I think, for W98
> > The pisser with W2K is I have 512 megs of DDR here, and a
> > reg hack to minimize swap usage; and yet I still boot up
> > with 46 megs of paged *KERNEL*!
> >
> > Whilst I have 255 megs of free ram
>
> This brings us to a good point to ask my question:
>
> How can I configure my Cyrix MII-300 box, 32MB of RAM, so it ain't dog slow
> swapping everything to disk when I fire up X?
>
> I have turned off just about every service and at that point, I'm right on
> the edge *before* I fire up X. It works great that way. I don't mind running
> the console, but the folks who are going to use it will be basically using a
> spreadsheet and doing some word processing. I even went so far as to remove
> the audio card to get back about 64k from the sound modules.
>
> Would it help to recompile the kernel?

Yes, but only if you know _exactly_ what hardware you have.  The kernel can be
trimmed down a bunch by selecting just your chipset, (not the shotgun approach
the pre-packaged kernels use) and compiling in the extra stuff, modules take
more memory.  This won't free up Megs, but every bit helps.  It may even run
faster.

Good Luck

Derek Loree