Re: Linux VM design

VDA
2001-09-25T10:57:40Z

Hello Dan,
Monday, September 24, 2001, 10:11:08 PM, you wrote:

DM> I hope this isn't the wrong place to ask this but, wouldn't it be better to
DM> increase ram size and decrease swap size as memory requirements grow? For
DM> instance, say I have a lightly loaded machine, that has 192MB of ram. From
DM> everything I've heard in the past, I'd use roughly 192MB of swap with this
DM> machine. The problem I would imagine is that if all 192MB got used wouldn't
DM> it be terribly slow to read/write that much data back in? Would less swap,
DM> say 32 MB make the kernel more restrictive with it's available memory and
DM> make the box more responsive when it's heavily using swap?

If you want everything to be fast, buy more RAM and use no swap whatsoever.

Swap is useful if your total memory requirements are big but working
set is significantly smaller. You need RAM to cover working set
and RAM+swap to cover total memory requirements.

As you can see, amount of RAM and swap thus *application dependent*.
--
Best regards, VDA
mailto:VDA@port.imtp.ilyichevsk.odessa.ua