From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Sun, 17 Jun 2001 15:30:28 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Sun, 17 Jun 2001 15:30:18 -0400 Received: from spiral.extreme.ro ([212.93.159.205]:2944 "HELO spiral.extreme.ro") by vger.kernel.org with SMTP id ; Sun, 17 Jun 2001 15:30:05 -0400 Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 22:31:47 +0300 From: Dan Podeanu To: Tom Rini Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: 2.4 VM & swap question Message-ID: <20010617223147.A5849@spiral.extreme.ro> Mail-Followup-To: Tom Rini , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org In-Reply-To: <20010617104836.B11642@opus.bloom.county> <20010617221239.B1027@spiral.extreme.ro> <20010617122033.F11642@opus.bloom.county> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.15i In-Reply-To: <20010617122033.F11642@opus.bloom.county>; from trini@kernel.crashing.org on Sun, Jun 17, 2001 at 12:20:33PM -0700 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org > Yes, I know there's no hard and fast rule for the exact ammount of ram/swap one > needs that will always work. However, in 2.2 for a 'workstation' one could > usually quite happily get away with having 128:128 and never have much of a > problem. with 2.4.0 and up this isn't the case. This has been the cause > of many people complaining quite loudly about 2.4 VM sucking and having > lots of OOM kills going about. It's also been called an 'aritificial limit' > since one of the VM people had a patch to 'fix' this. What I'm trying to > figure out is if this problem exists linearly or just with 'lower' ammounts > of total physical ram. ie if I jump up to 512mb and don't have a webserver > or database (ie I've got 512mb so I end up with a big disk cache) will I need > to have 1gb of swap just to keep the VM happy? Will 256 be enough? Could I > even live w/o swap? Probably you'd live with 512MB of swap. As for w/o swap? You need it atleast to hear the disks trashing and know you have to ctrl-c the damn process, if not anything else. I have: spiral:~# free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 254572 89936 164636 0 4352 48016 -/+ buffers/cache: 37568 217004 Swap: 530136 0 530136 With X, netscape and a gcc running and doing quite fine.