iphitus Posted June 15, 2004 Report Share Posted June 15, 2004 I personally, in general consider swap to be obsolete. My last computer had 160 ram, and was a P2 300mhz. A 512mb swap, reduced to 256, reduced to 100, then removed. I ran it with swap for most of it's time, however for its last weeks, it had none. There was no drop in performance. My current laptop, Pentium M 1.4ghz, 512mb ram, i started again with 512 swap. I removed it a few days ago to make room for a game. I have noticed no loss in performance. My memory usage in Linux, i havent seen tip over 200mb yet. I run fluxbox, OOo and many games including ET, CS, Soldier of Fortune & soon Neverwinternights and Baldurs gate 2 The most swap I have ever seen used on this is 8mb of that 512. I still believe swap does have some purposes, but not any major part on the desktop. I believe it's only use is in high intensity environments that require large amounts of RAM or those environments that are very low on main memory. If my old computer only ad 32mb of ram, which is what it initially came with, i agree, swap would be essential. By the average desktop, I mean one with at least 256 ram, usually 512mb. So swap in my opinion is obsolete on the average Linux desktop today. What do you think? iphitus Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted June 15, 2004 Report Share Posted June 15, 2004 Yep, I largely agree iph! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tyme Posted June 15, 2004 Report Share Posted June 15, 2004 I think it still has it's uses. I've eaten up swap a few times, especially when running a graphics creation programs (gimp, blender, etc. - especially blender) alongside other apps. not much, but some :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
iphitus Posted June 15, 2004 Author Report Share Posted June 15, 2004 I think it still has it's uses. I've eaten up swap a few times, especially when running a graphics creation programs (gimp, blender, etc. - especially blender) alongside other apps. not much, but some :) wow, 2 responses in 5 minutes lol. Yeah, i see tyme, GIMP has never eaten into my swap, but i do mainly linework and basic manipulations. I forgot about blender, but I guess its the sorta program along with video editing that would use it. iph Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tyme Posted June 15, 2004 Report Share Posted June 15, 2004 Yeah, i see tyme, GIMP has never eaten into my swap, but i do mainly linework and basic manipulations. I've had images with more layers than I want to even think about, and I like to keep a really long "Undo History" because I screw up a lot Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hirogen2 Posted June 15, 2004 Report Share Posted June 15, 2004 My last computer had 160 ram, and was a P2 300mhz. A 512mb swap, reduced to 256, reduced to 100, then removed. I ran it with swap for most of it's time, however for its last weeks, it had none.There was no drop in performance. That's true indeed. The rule "twice as swap as RAM" is way obsolete and was only meaningful when we had machines with 16MB RAM being a standard. back2topic: Sometimes it's amazing... I run two fat gcc's, one VMware (requesting 96MB plus some overhead) and all can be kept in RAM (256mb). But whenever you want to play games such as Unreal Tournament with lots of add-ons (stock UT doesnot need much) or even Americas Army, the UT or AA (which even is UT2K3 based) takes way up to 500 MB virtual size according to 'ps', and then you're lucky when you got some swap. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Qchem Posted June 15, 2004 Report Share Posted June 15, 2004 I still think its very worthwhile, I've currently got my swappiness set to 60. My calculation machines need swap more than you'd think. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted June 15, 2004 Report Share Posted June 15, 2004 (edited) I have 512MB ram and an AthlonXP 1900+ with a 250MB swap....it gets used all the time ....gotta have it. Granted, only about 20% ever gets used but I'm not short on hd space so..... After my gnome/xfree/nvidia issues eating up 2 swaps...that rt, 2 swaps at 500MB each.....gotta have it. Edited June 15, 2004 by bvc Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest anon Posted June 15, 2004 Report Share Posted June 15, 2004 This server has 2GB of ram, but still needs the swap. 5:25pm up 36 days, 6:06, 1 user, load average: 0.08, 0.04, 0.01102 processes: 101 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped CPU0 states: 0.1% user, 2.1% system, 0.0% nice, 97.2% idle CPU1 states: 0.2% user, 0.4% system, 0.0% nice, 98.4% idle Mem: 2064832K av, 1996452K used, 68380K free, 0K shrd, 50516K buff Swap: 530104K av, 26060K used, 504044K free Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted June 15, 2004 Report Share Posted June 15, 2004 [root@localhost Documents]# cat /proc/meminfo MemTotal: 1024276 kB MemFree: 110912 kB Buffers: 63636 kB Cached: 466328 kB SwapCached: 0 kB Active: 633800 kB Inactive: 189612 kB HighTotal: 0 kB HighFree: 0 kB LowTotal: 1024276 kB LowFree: 110912 kB SwapTotal: 0 kB SwapFree: 0 kB Dirty: 60 kB Writeback: 0 kB Mapped: 348460 kB Slab: 72332 kB Committed_AS: 704544 kB PageTables: 7372 kB VmallocTotal: 536870911 kB VmallocUsed: 16728 kB VmallocChunk: 536853099 kB Its worth noting that much of the used memory is actually cached disk..... but I can always just type swapon -a if I have mem intensive stuff. Using swap toi cache your disk writes is not an effective use of memory :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Urza9814 Posted June 15, 2004 Report Share Posted June 15, 2004 I started with 500MB swap on 9.2, then moved to 10.0CE...increased swap to 1 gig...increased to about 2 gigs...each time noticing a large preformance boost on 10.0CE...I then moved back to 9.2 and dropped...I think about a gig of it...and it does go faster than before...and I have 320MB RAM...now, my computer is about 5 years old...but still, I NEED swap...on 10.0CE with 1gig swap it ran so slow it literally (I timed it once) took me over 10 minutes to boot up firefox! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted June 15, 2004 Report Share Posted June 15, 2004 :woops: what was I thinking :unsure: .....I have 512MB ram not 256 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ac_dispatcher Posted June 15, 2004 Report Share Posted June 15, 2004 I tend to gzip some large files (over entire partitions). Or when I use DVDrip I tend to use a lot of the swap (500mb). Otherwise the 512mb of RAM can handle it all. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sherpa Posted June 16, 2004 Report Share Posted June 16, 2004 my comp has 1 GB of ram and it still uses swap.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
linux_learner Posted June 16, 2004 Report Share Posted June 16, 2004 with harddrives as big as they are, have a swap partition is no biggie. with ram as big as it is, one would think we dont need swap, but programmers seem to code apps to use that ram. as long as programmers code this way, we will need swap, unless we come out with a whole new way of memory management. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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