[Debian-eeepc-devel] Newbie experience

[Eric Cooper]

On Thu, Mar 06, 2008 at 10:42:05AM -0600, Karl O. Pinc wrote:
> 
> On 03/06/2008 06:09:33 AM, Ben Armstrong wrote:
> 
> > This is likely not clear because unless you're doing hibernate (which
> > in my opinion is a frill that most people can do without) you don't
> > need swap at all.  Feel free to leave a note in the wiki about this.
> 
> What are your thoughts that lead to this conclusion?  Even with
> memory mapping into the regular filesystem it seems to me that
> there are still cases for swap.  Please correct me if I'm wrong.

In normal use, especially if you load your Eee up with 2GB of RAM,
you're unlikely to need to swap.  On my desktop machine right now,
with 3G of memory, only 1.3G is in use, and only 700M if you don't
count the buffer cache (output of "free -m").  So I could run
everything currently on my desktop on my Eee as well, without
swapping.

> Another candidate would be entire applications that are
> started and then sit unused for long periods of time.
> I tend to have multiple desktop workspaces with different
> applications in each.  Some of these sit unused for hours
> or days at a time.  Better to use the RAM for running
> applications.

That's basically what Linux does already with the buffer cache.
Unmodified pages that contain file contents (programs or data) are
simply reused (not swapped out) whenever programs need more RAM,
because they can always be read back in from the filesystem when
needed.

-- 
Eric Cooper             e c c @ c m u . e d u