From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Mike Hardy Subject: Re: swap on RAID (was Re: swp - Re: ext3 journal on software raid) Date: Thu, 06 Jan 2005 09:46:55 -0800 Message-ID: <41DD798F.8030902@h3c.com> References: <41DC9420.5030701@h3c.com> <20050106093811.GB99565@caffreys.strugglers.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <20050106093811.GB99565@caffreys.strugglers.net> Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids Andy Smith wrote: > I interpret your views as (a) but I interpret Mike's as "there are > people who are saying that a correctly sized machine can have zero > swap configured." > > Having no swap configured and merely using no swap in normal > circumstances are very very different situations. You are correct that I was getting at the zero swap argument - and I agree that it is vastly different from simply not expecting it. It is important to know that there is no inherent need for swap in the kernel though - it is simply used as more "memory" (albeit slower, and with some optimizations to work better with real memory) and if you don't need it, you don't need it. That said, I mentioned my servers run with swap for the same reason I run with raid. I don't plan on having a disk very often (if at all), and I don't plan on needing swap very often (if at all), but when it happens, I expect my machine to keep running. (or at least I hope it does) -Mike