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Is Swap Necessary?

Posted by michael on from the got-swap? dept.

johnnyb writes "Kernel Trap has a great conversation on swap, whether it's necessary, why swapless systems might seem faster, and an overall discussion of swap issues in modern computing. This is often an issue for system administrators, and this is a great set of posts about the issue."

1 of 581 comments (clear)

  1. Hardly ever use swap by yhetti · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    None of my machines have less that 512 megs of RAM, (or more than 1.8GB) and I never use swap...never have a problem with it. It's faster because drive access doesn't have to compete w/ swap (even on SATA it's annoying).

    Okay...I lied. Does anybody else use Pan? I mean..wtf?! When I run Pan it's more like

    $ cat /dev/zero > /swap.tmp
    *wait 20 seconds*
    $ mkswap /swap.tmp
    $ swapon /swap.tmp
    $ exit
    # pan

    Pan is an awesome program, but seriously...when it can single handedly use > 1GB of RAM just stealing divx rips...