On Thu, 13 May 2004 01:49:26 -0800, Floyd L. Davidson wrote:


> Incidentally, I've just upgraded two machines from 2.6.0 to
> 2.6.6, and the first of them has been up for a day and a half
> now, and has yet to use 1 byte of swap. Mighty suspicious...
>
> If, by tomorrow, nothing gets paged out just because it was
> sleeping too long I'll probably back off to 2.6.5 to see if that
> changes.
>

Hello Floyd,

I use 2.6.5 on my 9.1 (regular version) and it uses no swap even under
stress. Recently I downloaded a rather huge file (700 megs). I used the
KDE Info center application to watch the behavior of memory and swap usage
while the download was in progress. At about 500 megabytes downloaded,
memory had been almost totally exhausted but no swap was in use. The last
200 megabytes of the download took place with only about 5 megabytes of
memory free and the machine seemed to operate quite happily on that basis.

The download completed OK with no apparent speed differences along the
way. The memory seemed to be exhausted by way of the disk cache just
expanding and expanding.

My machine has 512 megabytes of memory installed and has a 1 gigabyte swap
file on a separate logical partition on a separate physical drive. It
operates normally with about 250 megabytes of free physical memory and no
swap in use.

It seems strange, no swap in use. That *other* operating system uses swap
almost continuously so performance improves significantly if you place
swap on a separate channel. Maybe we need Linus to step in here and
explain how the memory management subsystem works. :-)

Linux seems to purr like a kitten though, regardless of not using swap.

--
John