Re: RH 6.2 install causes screen to explode

[Tobias Diedrich <ranma@example.com>]

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

>     Shimpei> With Linux 2.4.x, you need at least swap space at least
>     Shimpei> twice as big as your physical memory, or performance will
>     Shimpei> suffer.
> 
> Is this considered a feature?

You could say so.
This improves performance:
If the kernel reads in a page from swap the page in the swappartition
is not free so that if it has to be swapped out later and is still
unmodified it does not have to be written to disk (it's still there).

If the swapfile is not big enough has to find and reuse pages in your
swappartition that are currently in main memory, which takes some time.

IIRC the 2.2 behaviour was to always free a page in the swappartition 
after it had been swapped in, so you could get by with a smaller
swappartition.

But the rule has always been to make your swapfile at least twice as large
as your physical memory.


-- 
Tobias
pgpkeyid: 0x9AC7E0BC
be calm..., be collected..., be _cat_.