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Date: Sun, 18 Nov 2001 22:42:20 +0100
From: =?ISO-8859-15?Q?Fran=E7ois?= Cami <stilgar2k@wanadoo.fr>
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To: war <war@starband.net>
Cc: James A Sutherland <jas88@cam.ac.uk>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Swap
In-Reply-To: <3BF82443.5D3E2E11@starband.net> <E165ZRi-000718-00@mauve.csi.cam.ac.uk> <3BF827E1.5A2C7427@starband.net>
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I don't understand why it should be better with swap then... I mean,
my comp seems to run so much faster (it doesn't take time to switch
from one app to another, i mean) *without* swap.
And I see no benefits to having an active swap, other than making my
hard drive work harder.

comp is PIII933/512MB on ATA100
kernel is 2.4.14 with XFS patch.

Fran?ois


war wrote:

> Well, without the swap, everything seems to be about 100% more responsive when
> I execute any task.
> I see how it works now.
> 
> James A Sutherland wrote:
> 
> 
>>On Sunday 18 November 2001 9:12 pm, war wrote:
>>
>>>It is amazing that I could run all of that stuff, because:
>>>
>>>When I have swap on, and if I run all of those programs, 200-400MB of
>>>swap is used.
>>>
>>Yep. There's a reason for that: the kernel is *ALWAYS* able to swap pages out
>>to disk - even without "swap space". Disabling swapspace simply forces the
>>kernel to swap out more code, since it cannot swap out any data.
>>
>>(This is why you can still get "disk thrashing" without any swap - in fact,
>>it's more likely in this case than it is with some swap added - you are just
>>forcing your binaries to take more of the swapping load instead.)
>>
>>So: with swapspace, the kernel swaps out a few hundred Mb of unused data, to
>>make room for more code. Without it, the kernel is forced to swap out code
>>pages instead. The big news here is...?
>>
>>James.
>>
> 
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