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#1 2011-03-23 11:07:01

gulafaran
Member
Registered: 2011-02-09
Posts: 22

Question about SWAP

when i was installing i hadnt cleaned out my second hdd that i was gonna use for swap so i skipped making one upon installation and now im wondering if i should even make one, will it improve performance even tho i have 8 gb of ram?

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#2 2011-03-23 11:14:37

lives2evil
Member
From: GMT+7
Registered: 2010-03-21
Posts: 244

Re: Question about SWAP

Oh, that's just too much ram too spare. try running conky. when you see your ram % reach 80% then you truely need one (which is unlikely)
I have only 4 Gb Ram but my swap is always 0 smile
Perhaps some heavy task like 3D designing could use up your ram though.

Last edited by lives2evil (2011-03-23 11:17:23)


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#3 2011-03-23 11:16:31

dmg
Member
From: croatia
Registered: 2011-02-24
Posts: 20

Re: Question about SWAP

You need swap if you want to suspend to ram aka put computer to sleep
Check the corresponding wiki:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pm-utils/

use the source!

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#4 2011-03-23 11:30:38

gulafaran
Member
Registered: 2011-02-09
Posts: 22

Re: Question about SWAP

ok then its quite unnecessery to add one since i dont use suspend to ram/ sleep and obviously wont run out of ram usage i guess wink

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#5 2011-03-23 11:30:49

ngoonee
Forum Fellow
From: Between Thailand and Singapore
Registered: 2009-03-17
Posts: 7,354

Re: Question about SWAP

dmg wrote:

You need swap if you want to suspend to ram aka put computer to sleep
Check the corresponding wiki:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pm-utils/

Not necessarily, you could always suspend to a file without having a swap partition.

EDIT: I just noticed you mentioned 'to ram'. You don't need a swap for that, you need it for suspending to disk.

Last edited by ngoonee (2011-03-23 11:31:26)


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#6 2011-03-23 11:44:11

dmg
Member
From: croatia
Registered: 2011-02-24
Posts: 20

Re: Question about SWAP

You are right, I meant disk. I think if one wants to use suspending suspend2disk is a better solution since no electricity is consumed and booting is a lot faster.


use the source!

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#7 2011-03-23 13:56:39

ANOKNUSA
Member
Registered: 2010-10-22
Posts: 2,141

Re: Question about SWAP

dmg wrote:

You are right, I meant disk. I think if one wants to use suspending suspend2disk is a better solution since no electricity is consumed and booting is a lot faster.

My experience has been that it isn't exactly faster; it really tends to be close to the same boot time, just with a couple of apps open already once the desktop is up and running.  In my opinion, that leaves me with booting clean as the better option, since it ensures proper loading of any new updates.  I often need to wait for wicd to connect after resuming too, whereas on a cold boot-up it's initialized with the other daemons.  This could just be my machine though; in my case, I've never shot past two-thirds my ram on a heavy workload (browser, music player, LibreOffice, XP in a VM) with 4 gigs to work with, so I don't use swap.

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#8 2011-03-23 14:01:43

Inxsible
Forum Fellow
From: Chicago
Registered: 2008-06-09
Posts: 9,183

Re: Question about SWAP

I have always created a swap of 512 MB -- my old machine only had 256MB RAM. That practice also made me put a 512 MB RAM in my new machine with 4GB of RAM which doesn't get used much. And obviously I don't suspend.


Maybe I should remove the swap and use the 512 MB in my home or something -- just for the heck of it.


Forum Rules

There's no such thing as a stupid question, but there sure are a lot of inquisitive idiots !

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#9 2011-03-23 15:08:38

dmg
Member
From: croatia
Registered: 2011-02-24
Posts: 20

Re: Question about SWAP

I thought that linux uses all the available memory and even more for caching. I have 4 gigs of ram and use cca 150 mb (I just have dwm, no DE) but after a day of working it can get up to 3.7 gigs.
One view:

http://www.alexonlinux.com/swap-vs-no-swap

Last edited by dmg (2011-03-23 15:10:02)


use the source!

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