Re: made swap too small

On 2014-07-15 15:36, Kevin Fries wrote:
>> the vanilla kernel's suspend-to-disk feature. If you're using that,
>> then your swap partition size should be roughly equal to your RAM
> There are two types of swap in Linux.  The one everyone knows is the
> swap partition.  But you can also have a file based swap.

Of course. Swap files can be useful, but they are slightly slower than
partitions, and you can't use a swap file with the kernel's
suspend-to-disk feature.

> And while you are limited to one partition based swap, you can have
> many file based swaps.

Huh? Before 2.4.10, the kernel could use a maximum of 8 swap
partitions/files. ISTR the docs for SuSE 6.1 talking about multiple
swap partitions in 1999. "man 2 swapon" says the limit is at least 32
now. I've used 2 swap partitions not that long ago with a vanilla 3.12
kernel.

> swap is a poor substitute for ram

Yes. However, the swapper is supposed to find pages in RAM that aren't
being used and push those pages out to disk, leaving more RAM for use by
active processes (firefox, mysqld, gimp, libreoffice....) so the active
processes run faster. That's the theory, at least. Since everyone and
their brother now has at least 4G of RAM in their machines, swapping is
less important than it used to be and a lot of the time, you can get by
without it.

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