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#1 2004-08-26 16:03:39

lubot
Member
Registered: 2003-10-18
Posts: 14

Please make a swap partition optional at installation

Because i have enough RAM i would like to skip the creation of a swap partition at the setup.
Could you please make this available at the next (0.7) release?

lubot smile

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#2 2004-08-26 16:26:44

Xentac
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From: Victoria, BC
Registered: 2003-01-17
Posts: 1,797
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Re: Please make a swap partition optional at installation

if someone hasn't already, submit a bug report.


I have discovered that all of mans unhappiness derives from only one source, not being able to sit quietly in a room
- Blaise Pascal

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#3 2004-08-26 17:26:15

lubot
Member
Registered: 2003-10-18
Posts: 14

Re: Please make a swap partition optional at installation

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#4 2004-08-26 21:55:45

IceRAM
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From: Bucharest, Romania
Registered: 2004-03-04
Posts: 772
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Re: Please make a swap partition optional at installation

Hmm.. some smart guys coding the kernel said some time ago that having swap is a good idea because the kernel is somehow made that it balances the RAM usage with the swap. Somebody even sugested creating a ramdrive (with some kind of fs) to host the swap drive. It sounds kind of strange/silly if you have a huge RAM, but still... how do you know you won't ever fill it up? (by some not so well behavied program).

I don't have a well defined opinion on this but... they might be right. Anyway, if you have plenty of RAM, you might want to check the available "kernel flavours" (ck, mm, love etc.) to see if any of them includes something that favours your RAM-full computer.

Check the topics on http://kerneltrap.org for more info.

Good luck and let us know your final decision on this.

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#5 2004-08-27 01:25:07

lubot
Member
Registered: 2003-10-18
Posts: 14

Re: Please make a swap partition optional at installation

I am running my system without a swap drive for several weeks now and i got no problems as yet. Before i turned it off i watched my systems swap usage and it was always ~zero.

Putting swap on a ramdisc is generally a bad idea unless you have really lots of RAM, i think.
Because it wastes RAM which could be used to prevent swap usage.

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#6 2004-08-27 05:52:10

sarah31
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From: Middle of Canada
Registered: 2002-08-20
Posts: 2,975
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Re: Please make a swap partition optional at installation

interesting i have 1 gb of ram and my swap still gets used.


AKA uknowme

I am not your friend

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#7 2004-08-27 08:35:37

IceRAM
Member
From: Bucharest, Romania
Registered: 2004-03-04
Posts: 772
Website

Re: Please make a swap partition optional at installation

As far as I remember Con Kolivas was testing some VM managers lately in his ck kernels.
These include hard swapiness (in <2.6.8.1-ck4) and mapped watermark (in 2.6.8.1-ck4).

http://members.optusnet.com.au/ckolivas/kernel/

Sun Aug 22 20:19:47 EST 2004
Mapped watermark??
This readjusts the way memory is evicted by lightly removing cached ram once the ram is more than 2/3 full, if less than the "mapped watermark" percent of ram is mapped ram (ie applications). The normal system is to aggresively start scanning ram once it is completely full. The benefits of this are:
1. Allocating memory while ram is being lightly scanned is faster and cheaper than when it is being heavily scanned.
2. There is usually some free ram which tends to speed up application startup times.
3. Swapping is an unusual event instead of a common one if you have enough ram for your workload.
4. It is rare for your applications to be swapped out by file cache pressure.
Disadvantage: Less file cache.

The mapped watermark is configurable so a server for example might be happy to have a lower mapped percentage. The default is 66 and a server might like 33

echo 33 > /proc/sys/vm/mapped

This removes the swappiness knob entirely and deprecates all my previous vm hacks (autoregulated swappiness, hard swappiness, kiflush).

You must be aware that the normal system usually shrinks the memory allocated for buffers & file cache until it becomes close to ZERO, making almost all the memory available for user applications.

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