[PLUG] Swap or Not?

Paul Johnson baloo at ursine.ca
Fri Jan 30 18:23:01 UTC 2004


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On Thu, Jan 29, 2004 at 11:47:44PM -0800, Derek Loree wrote:
> > Survival tactic, and not a bad one, really:  If something is eating
> > all the RAM, eventually it'll gun the offending process.
> 
> Better than locking up the whole OS anyway, like M$ tends to do.

That's what I mean.  If Windows and Linux were biological organisms,
Windows would eat until it explodes, Linux would just barf back down
to a more comfortable capacity.

> True, however, I've read that too much swap space can grind your machine
> to a virtual stand still.

True, but sometimes you can unstick things a bit using sysrq-k if
you're in X.

> I've read about the changes made to the disk scheduler, the specs make
> it look like it will add both Nitric Oxide and turbo charging to disk
> I/O system.  So now with 10,000 rpm IDE drives, serial ATA RAID and
> super fast I/O in the kernel, consumer grade machines might actually
> start to act _really_ fast.  (I have seen very few consumer grade
> machines that act like anything I would consider to be fast.)

Yeah.  That's nice, disk I/O is really fast.  Now I just have to
wonder why some programs seem to hang for a moment grinding hard on
the CPU and nothing else...

- -- 
 .''`.     Paul Johnson <baloo at ursine.ca>
: :'  :    
`. `'`     proud Debian admin and user
  `-  Debian - when you have better things to do than fix a system
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