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Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2001 17:22:35 +0100
From: Stephan von Krawczynski <skraw@ithnet.com>
To: linux-kernel <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Swap vs No Swap.
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On Thu, 22 Nov 2001 16:11:29 -0000
"Elgar, Jeremy" <JElgar@ndsuk.com> wrote:

> Hum think I'm going to test this idea out tonight, quick question without
> swap at what point would the kernel stop giving memory up for cache
> purposes. For example I noticed on Tuesday whist doing a back up of a file
> system (in-line tar cd untar) I was left with ~4 Mb left having nearly the
> rest of my 2Gb Ram used for cache.
> 
> Would this ram be given back to the free pool much more readily? 

Not to my knowledge. Since I was pretty much bitten by swap in former days I
plugged in more RAM and stopped swap completely. I must admit that it didn't
get any faster, but trashing is gone (obviously). But this is only because of
my own dumbness placing swap on the same drive as root-fs. I guess it would be
a good idea to use the former small hds (1-2 GB) for swap completely, so any
bad interaction with normal fs is omitted.
BTW maybe you should try the latest preX versions, they tend to have more
_free_ mem available and perform pretty ok on my system.

Regards,
Stephan
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