Hey everyone, I'll just get these all in one e-mail First off, my disks had the following config each 2GB partition for mirrors (boot, backup, and upgrade mirrors) 256MB swap paritions 198GB RAID5 paritions so, i had six swap partitons for a total of 1.5GB + .5GB of RAM This is way more than I need, and now that I think about it, a bad idea. Swap was MAJORLY fast, but who cares, I rarely used it. Because I used them all, I will be facing a slowdown, even with RAID1's distributed read, but I don't really care... I plan on Mirroring it three ways, so I have two 256MB swap mirrors. Overcompensating, I know. What I was more concerned about was if people did it and it could be done. > What other reasons are these (genuine question - I'm curious) The other reasons for swap are these. 1. Linux caches all HDD activity. Allowing Linux to use RAM for cache and HDD for swap can actually speed up system with lots of RAM. Now, linux may never actualy swap anything if you have WAY too much (is there such a thing?) RAM, but the point is still valid. 2. Linux isn't very good at memory clean up. Unused pages in RAM may never get flushed, or if they do, it requires actual processing (if forget which) while unused pages in Swap just get forgotten. This may lead to guy's 100% CPU utilization, I don't know if the persons swap was full or buggy or what, but it sounds like the arguement for using swap. So, in short, swap can be used as "/dev/null" for unused pages. 3. Disk be cheap. There were more, but I forget There was a big debate on the Linux Kernel forum between the "Use" and the "Use nots" and the "Use" people made more good arguments, which the key argument was "It can't hurt" (which isn't 100% true, but, its around 97.523423333_% true.) ======================================================================== For your reading pleasure Linux: Is Swap Necessary? http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/3202 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
