From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from lists.gentoo.org ([140.105.134.102] helo=robin.gentoo.org) by nuthatch.gentoo.org with esmtp (Exim 4.54) id 1FCHc5-0002XJ-Gq for garchives@archives.gentoo.org; Thu, 23 Feb 2006 14:38:37 +0000 Received: from robin.gentoo.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by robin.gentoo.org (8.13.5/8.13.5) with SMTP id k1NEbLUD011898; Thu, 23 Feb 2006 14:37:21 GMT Received: from vms040pub.verizon.net (vms040pub.verizon.net [206.46.252.40]) by robin.gentoo.org (8.13.5/8.13.5) with ESMTP id k1NEXLdo004423 for ; Thu, 23 Feb 2006 14:33:22 GMT Received: from mail.joat.com ([71.114.144.163]) by vms040.mailsrvcs.net (Sun Java System Messaging Server 6.2-4.02 (built Sep 9 2005)) with ESMTPA id <0IV50013F9RLY190@vms040.mailsrvcs.net> for gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org; Thu, 23 Feb 2006 08:33:21 -0600 (CST) Received: from localhost (cornholio.joat.com [127.0.0.1]) by mail.joat.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9856D1567D for ; Thu, 23 Feb 2006 09:33:20 -0500 (EST) Received: from mail.joat.com ([127.0.0.1]) by localhost (mail.joat.com [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port 10024) with ESMTP id 16399-09 for ; Thu, 23 Feb 2006 09:33:19 -0500 (EST) Received: from [127.0.0.1] (dnebing.tbbgl.com [141.151.196.13]) by mail.joat.com (Postfix) with ESMTP for ; Thu, 23 Feb 2006 09:33:19 -0500 (EST) Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2006 09:30:18 -0500 From: Dave Nebinger Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] How many GB for / partition? In-reply-to: <200602231555.18509.uwix@iway.na> To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Message-id: <43FDC6FA.1060807@joat.com> Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail X-BeenThere: gentoo-user@gentoo.org Reply-to: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit X-Virus-Scanned: amavisd-new at joat.com References: <28958.1140696299@www077.gmx.net> <200602231555.18509.uwix@iway.na> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060130 SeaMonkey/1.0 X-Archives-Salt: fbe7afd6-17b6-40da-9eab-5430772e383d X-Archives-Hash: fe1c68d63f0be8ad55c93806393000e0 Uwe Thiem wrote: >> 3. because it is always better to have too much ram/swap then too little > Nnnnot always. There are circumstances when you do not want swap at all. This is never true. Swap is *always* called for, and for a good reason. Your example of having a real-time responsive app requiring memory residence is a determining factor of how much physical memory you'll need to keep the app resident. But the truth of the matter is this will not be your only app running on the system. Throw some big memory hogs into play, i.e. an active X session running locally and that remote X session you've started from work, and pretty soon you can find yourself eating up that 1gb that you thought would be fine. Except that since you did not have any swap enabled, once you reach the 1gb limit, processes start failing. You find yourself unable to log into the box because there's not enough memory to spawn a new shell. You're forced to hard-boot the system and hope that the HD caches were flushed to the disk before you hit the reset button. Having swap is just another manner of safe-guarding your system. Once you breach the physical limit, there's always swap to fall back on. Sure all of your apps will suffer while swapping occurs, but at least you stand a chance of cleaning up the situation w/o facing the hard reboot option. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list