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Re: [LUG] A sorry disc tale



Neil Williams wrote:

Now, one question.

If I install Slackware, Debian, Lycoris, etc. on this 3Gb, can they use the
EXISTING swap partition (now hda7) or do I have to do more fiddling with
diskdrake and create another swap partition? After all, only one Linux distro
will be running at a time.

You can have multiple installs of Linux share the same swap
partition, for as long as you run them one at a time.

(Theo I assume user space Linux allows multiple Linux instances
to share the same memory/swap ??)

If you surf around you'll even discover you can have Windows put
it's paging file on the same partition, but I think you have to
arrange for it to be formatted each time Windows boots or some
such.

If you have enough memory in hardware, swap is kind of an
unnecessary waste of disk space these days. Working on big HP-UX
systems, you'd be amazed at how many people religiously follow
the old rule of thumb and have 1.5 times as much swap as
physical memory. Some of these systems have 4GB+ of memory, and
6GB+ of properly redundant swap is still quite a lot of disk
space to lose on systems that may only want to run a small
Oracle instance in memory.

Says Simon with 400MB of swap, 128MB of memory, and only 9MB of
swap in use.

Large swap space was more important when OSes would swap whole
processes out at the drop of a hat (like Cray C90's did - no
virtual memory on Crays as virtual memory requires an extra
level of indirection, and that would slow you down). These days
*nix machines need to be in severe memory trouble before they
would even consider deliberately swapping out a whole process,
these days aggressively paging data to disk is the norm. Of
course getting people to call it "page space" not "swap space"
will never happen.

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