Re: [gentoo-user] Swap performance

[Volker Armin Hemmann <volkerarmin@googlemail.com>]

On Thursday 26 May 2011 00:40:21 Alex Schuster wrote:
> Paul Hartman writes:
> > On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 9:20 AM, Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org>
> > wrote:
> > 
> > I can't remember the last time my swap was used at all. I have 12G of
> > RAM, but in my prior system with 8G it was the same. Only in a rare
> > case when some program had run-away memory usage/memory leak did I
> > ever get to swap usage... I'm using vanilla kernel 2.6.39 with no
> > patches, no BFS. And I use proprietary nvidia-drivers. I normally
> > don't have so many programs running at once, but it happens sometimes.
> 
> Maybe I should have bought 4G instead of 2G, so I'd have 10G, not 8G.
> I'm not sure if this is recommended these days, to have one memory bank
> with 4G and 3 others with 2G each.
> 

It is very much not recommended nor wise.

Sometimes it works great, sometimes it just works, sometimes it burns down 
your village, rapes your cattle and steals your dad.

> 
> It's growing: 1405m VIRT, 851m RES, 6m SHR. Strange, I did not actually
> use the desktop after I wrote the mail you replied to, currently I'm
> logged in from remote.

and you know that those numbers are pretty much meaningless?

about swap:

8gb ram, 24gb swap here. Swap so huge because of historical reasons (started 
with one disk with 8gb, now there are three...). But not so bad, considering 
all those tempfs mounts that can shoved in there.

Of course I am scared about the shitstorm if that ever happens.

I am using the standard scheduler, no fancy io-scheduling stuff, kernel 
2.6.36.6 and can't complain.

Even after a week of uptime I only get 500mb swap. Some cruft still in memory 
for some i-dont-know-reasons shoved in the hellhole swap so it won't get in 
the way of the more important stuff. Like gwenview. Or vlc.