[clug] to swap or not to swap that is the question

[Kim Holburn]

On 2004 Jun 30, , at 9:54 AM, Martin Pool wrote:
> Suppose you start a program at bootup that allocates and writes to 4MB
> of memory, and then never touches it again.  In fact, suppose the
> process sleeps and never runs again at all.

Ummm, why run it then?

> With no swap space, that
> memory has to stay in RAM, using up space that could be used for disk
> cache, holding programs, or other data.  With swap, the kernel can
> write it to swap in the background, and never need to read it back in.
> So the cost is very small and it frees up memory.
>
> Obviously you don't have a program which does exactly that, but you
> probably do have some few pages like that.  So allocate a bit of swap
> and let the kernel do its thing.


-- 
Kim Holburn
IT Manager, Canberra Research Laboratory
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