Performance enhancements

[Net Llama!]

On Mon, 30 Dec 2002, Marvin P. Dickens wrote:
> (1) DISABLING SWAP SPACE
>
> Many programs run best without a swap space. With memory sizes increasing and hard drives still rotating at the same rate they were spinning in 1998, swap spaces are pointless (If you have the RAM... ). The question then is how to make Linux run without a swap space since all distributions like to install them by default. (It's funny.... I remember when the caldera disto installed a swap, but did not activate it... The user community went nuts) Theoretically you should be able to do:

I beg to differ.  AFAIK back in 1998 there were no drives in production
that had 15k, or even 10k RPMs.  Or are you ignoring the existence of SCSI
drives?

> Then recompile the kernel. As a side note, I know alot of people do not want to run a system without a swap space. However, If you've got more than 750MB of ram in your system the chances are you're never gonna use a swap space.

All recent 2.4.x kernels consume physical memory before going to swap.
That said, completely disabling swap sounds like a recipe for disaster, as
the kernel will start randomly terminating processing that are fighting
for memory that doesn't exist.


-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lonni J Friedman				netllama at linux-sxs.org
Linux Step-by-step & TyGeMo		     http://netllama.ipfox.com