Monday 11 of August 2003 16:29 je &e pisal: >On Mon, 11 Aug 2003 15:10:45 +0100 > >Antony Gelberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> On Mon, Aug 11, 2003 at 01:47:17PM +0200, Nejko Zidarjev wrote: >> Aside from that, why do you have a 2GB swapfile anyway, as you don't >> appear to even be close to using all of your physical RAM? > > I'm sure you know all this, Antony, I'm writing this for Nejko's (and >other reader's) edification. > > On a personal machine the old rule of thumb of 2xRAM for swap kind of >breaks when one gets close to or over 512Mb RAM. Right now I am running > KDE, decoding from some binaries groups with Pan, writing this message in > Sylpheed, have a few rxvt terminals open and browsing web pages in Opera. > This machine also run my Samba host, Apache, Apace-SSL, Bind, ProFTPd, a > dedicated Counter-Strike server and a slew of other things I don't recall > off the top of my head. Oh, I also carved off some memory for /tmp. 80Mb > of which 1Mb is in use right now. On 640Mb of RAM here's what free shows: > >[EMAIL PROTECTED]:~} free > total used free shared buffers cached >Mem: 645468 628668 16800 0 62748 261604 >-/+ buffers/cache: 304316 341152 >Swap: 32760 32752 8 > > Sure I'm using about 1/2 of the RAM for applications and the like but > 1/2 is essentially free. The 32Mb of swap is most likely things that > haven't been touched in ages. The 32Mb is a dedicated swap file (not > partition) for just that purpose. > > I'm not concerned because I also have swapd running. It is configured > to kick in if physical RAM drops under ~100Mb and create a 32Mb Swap file. > It can make up to 7 before it konks out. I've seen it as high as 5. I > have such a convoluted way of handling memory because I wanted to keep the > protection of /tmp not being a part of / but having only 10Mb to play with > I can afford to carve off tons of drive space for the dedicated task of > swap. Right now my swap has a range of 32-256 which seems to be adequate > for my needs. If I ever pushed the machine too hard I can always twiddle > with swapd's configuration and tune it for a little higher limit. > > So once Nejko figures out what is causing his machine to be so slow >reducing the swap partition to something smaller would definitely be in > order. With 1Gb of RAM and presuming if it is a personal system I'd advise > dropping the swap partition completely and going with a small static swap > file with swapd to create a larger swap space if needed. I know that a > swap file is slower than a dedicated partition but let's face it, if it is > a desktop machine if one is hitting swap speed isn't going to be the main > consideration; not crashing is. All that is needed there is swap to grow > into to get the machine under control.
I see. I'm pretty new to Debian and all. I've read that a swap partition is better than the swap file (as in Windoze). I created a 2gig swap partition because I like to be "prepared". I'm using dialup but hope that I will soon be using a broadband connection where my computer will become a mail and maybe also a web server (depend how much will I learn about using Debian in this period). I came to realize that I've created an infinite loop with the scripts that should be run when a dialup connection is made. I corrected this loop and so far every thing seems to be working with the expected speed (on a 1.6GHz P4). Question: How do I turn off the swap partition (in a few steps)? Thanks, Jernej Zidar -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
