Re: Swap vs No Swap.

["François Cami" <stilgar2k@wanadoo.fr>]

Rik van Riel wrote:

> On Thu, 22 Nov 2001, James A Sutherland wrote:
>>Obviously, there are cases where removing swap breaks the system
>>entirely, but even in other cases, adding swap should *never* degrade
>>performance. (In theory, anyway; in practice, it still needs
>>tuning...)
>>
> 
> Not quite true.  The VM cannot look into the future, so if
> you have swap it could have just swapped out the application
> on the desktop you're about to switch to ;)


I tend to agree. Especially since in some cases (i.e. after
a long compilation (read : lots of code)), the VM has the most
excellent idea to swap out all the GUI (X+apps) and everyone
here knows how long it can be to restore the GUI in that case.

Obviously the problem is very much lessened, in my case, when
i put the swap partition on the *other* drive than the root fs.
Both are ATA100 (40GB 60GXPs), and the system is more responsive
with swap on hdc while / in on hda, than both on hda.

François