D&C GLug - Home Page

[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]

Re: [LUG] Hard Drives

 

On Wed, 9 Dec 2009, Paul Hirst wrote:

Regarding turning off swap entirely, why would you want to do this? As I
understand it the kernel will swap things out because they are memory
pages that it really doesn't seem to need anymore and it thinks it would
be better off using the memory for other caching purposes.

A modern Linux kernel runs perfectly well without swap. Executables are demand-paged in directly from their disk image, as required. All my PBXs run without swap as it's simply not needed.

If you're into tuning and want ultimate speed, then making sure the system never swaps is a good first move!

Of-course if you do have a process that soaks up memory, it'll crash and burn, but only sooner than it otherwise would with swap...

Gordon

--
The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG
http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list
FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html