# 2 or 4 GB DDR2 memory for Gentoo / Do I need swap?

## Kasumi_Ninja

I wonder if it makes sense to put 4GB memory in my Gentoo box. Will it make a difference? What will exactly speed up? Portage? ETQW? Virtualbox? Here are the specs of my system:

Mobo: Asus P5W

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo CPU E8400 @ 3.00GHz

GFX card: Sapphire HD 3850 (512MB GDDR3)

Harddrive: 2x 1 TB samsung spinpoint

----------

## frostschutz

If you can get RAM for cheap it makes sense, as more RAM never hurts. I have 8GB RAM not because I'd need it but because RAM was so cheap at the time I bought it (<100$ for 8GB, and I still remember the times where I had to pay 100$ for 8MB...) - I simply could not resist.  :Smile:  RAM is used for whatever you use it for; unused RAM is used for file system cache so it speeds up anything that has to do with files.

----------

## n8wunsch

if you can afford the RAM, it will never hurt to have 4G. I have 1.5G in my Gentoo box, and it is barely using 20% of it (even with kde running). It comes in handy though when using  Windows vmware.

Another thing where I like RAM for gentoo is temerge http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Speeding_up_portage_with_tmpfs.

Beeing able to "spend" 1 or 2G for portage to emerge in does speed up a lot of things.

----------

## jmartos

Keep in mind that you will need to recompile your kernel to enable the 64GB memory setting in order to see your memory above 3.5GB. The 3.5 may not be exact, but close to it. I agree with the more memory the better comments. Especially with the deals you can find.

----------

## Nerevar

 *n8wunsch wrote:*   

> 
> 
> Another thing where I like RAM for gentoo is temerge http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Speeding_up_portage_with_tmpfs.
> 
> 

 

Thanks for the tip n8wunsch. I'm going to try that out.

----------

## gerard27

Hi,

jmartos wrote:

 *Quote:*   

> 
> 
> Keep in mind that you will need to recompile your kernel to enable the 64GB memory setting in order to see your memory above 3.5GB. The 3.5 may not be exact, but close to it. I agree with the more memory the better comments. Especially with the deals you can find.
> 
> 

 

This is true when you use a 32 bit kernel.

When you use 64 bit the Highmem option is not available or needed.

Gerard.

PS: Thanks n8wunsch!

I have 4G ram on the same board as Aniruddha.

Tried emerge xorg-x11 took about 2 minutes!

I am running 32 bit.

G.

----------

## frostschutz

Be careful about that tmpfs, the speed up should not be that huge as Linux uses free memory for a file cache anyway, and some ebuilds require a lot of space (in case of tmpfs a lot of memory) while they are being installed.

----------

## Evincar

2 GB RAM are what, 35€? You are building a seriously powerful machine, dude, do not be mean with RAM. the kernel WILL find a use for it.

----------

## kernelOfTruth

 *Aniruddha wrote:*   

> I wonder if it makes sense to put 4GB memory in my Gentoo box. Will it make a difference? What will exactly speed up? Portage? ETQW? Virtualbox? Here are the specs of my system:
> 
> Mobo: Asus P5W
> 
> Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo CPU E8400 @ 3.00GHz
> ...

 

the whole system will be much faster due to loads of caching

emerges, openoffice, desktop interactivity ...

with more than 4.2 GB of ram you can compile openoffice entirely in a ram-drive / tmpfs

I got the same board (p5w dh deluxe) and 8 GB of ram of that sweet G.SKill Ram: G.SKill 4GB Kit DDR2 PC2-8000 (F2-8000CL5D-4GBPQ) CL5 it doesn't work @1000MHz on all boards but around 920 - 950 MHz it's fine and an FSB of 300   :Smile: 

----------

## Kasumi_Ninja

Thanks for the answers, I guess I will be adding another 2GB soon   :Wink:  I never thought it mattered since my desktop never uses more then 1 GB of the 32GB's available.

----------

## Kasumi_Ninja

Hmm this is strange, I have added another 2GB of ram but the bios and Gentoo only see GB 3   :Rolling Eyes:   I have the high mem (64GB) kenrel option enabled.

```
$ cat /proc/meminfo 

MemTotal:      3245628 kB

MemFree:         97356 kB

Buffers:          9528 kB

Cached:        2813384 kB

SwapCached:          0 kB

Active:         214728 kB

Inactive:      2758316 kB

HighTotal:     2358784 kB

HighFree:         6016 kB

LowTotal:       886844 kB

LowFree:         91340 kB

SwapTotal:      979924 kB

SwapFree:       979736 kB

Dirty:           35560 kB

Writeback:       11148 kB

AnonPages:      150248 kB

Mapped:          68204 kB

Slab:            55044 kB

SReclaimable:    37944 kB

SUnreclaim:      17100 kB

PageTables:       3044 kB

NFS_Unstable:        0 kB

Bounce:              0 kB

CommitLimit:   2602736 kB

Committed_AS:   528112 kB

VmallocTotal:   118776 kB

VmallocUsed:     17620 kB

VmallocChunk:   100992 kB
```

```
  ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Processor type and features ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐

  │  Arrow keys navigate the menu.  <Enter> selects submenus --->.  Highlighted letters are hotkeys.  Pressing <Y> includes, <N> excludes, <M> modularizes features.  Press <Esc><Esc> to exit, <?> for Help, </> for Search.  Legend:   │  

  │  [*] built-in  [ ] excluded  <M> module  < > module capable                                                                                                                                                                          │  

  │                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      │  

  │                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      │  

  │ ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │  

  │ │                                                                              [ ] Tickless System (Dynamic Ticks)                                                                                                                 │ │  

  │ │                                                                              [ ] High Resolution Timer Support                                                                                                                   │ │  

  │ │                                                                              [*] Symmetric multi-processing support                                                                                                              │ │  

  │ │                                                                                  Subarchitecture Type (PC-compatible)  --->                                                                                                      │ │  

  │ │                                                                              [*] Single-depth WCHAN output                                                                                                                       │ │  

  │ │                                                                              [ ] Paravirtualized guest support  --->                                                                                                             │ │  

  │ │                                                                                  Processor family (Core 2/newer Xeon)  --->                                                                                                      │ │  

  │ │                                                                              [ ] Generic x86 support                                                                                                                             │ │  

  │ │                                                                              [*] HPET Timer Support                                                                                                                              │ │  

  │ │                                                                              (32) Maximum number of CPUs (2-255)                                                                                                                 │ │  

  │ │                                                                              [*] SMT (Hyperthreading) scheduler support                                                                                                          │ │  

  │ │                                                                              [*] Multi-core scheduler support                                                                                                                    │ │  

  │ │                                                                                  Preemption Model (Voluntary Kernel Preemption (Desktop))  --->                                                                                  │ │  

  │ │                                                                              [*] Preempt The Big Kernel Lock                                                                                                                     │ │  

  │ │                                                                              [*] Machine Check Exception                                                                                                                         │ │  

  │ │                                                                              <*>   Check for non-fatal errors on AMD Athlon/Duron / Intel Pentium 4                                                                              │ │  

  │ │                                                                              [*]   check for P4 thermal throttling interrupt.                                                                                                    │ │  

  │ │                                                                              [*] Enable VM86 support                                                                                                                             │ │  

  │ │                                                                              < > Toshiba Laptop support                                                                                                                          │ │  

  │ │                                                                              < > Dell laptop support                                                                                                                             │ │  

  │ │                                                                              [*] Enable X86 board specific fixups for reboot                                                                                                     │ │  

  │ │                                                                              <M> /dev/cpu/microcode - Intel IA32 CPU microcode support                                                                                           │ │  

  │ │                                                                              <M> /dev/cpu/*/msr - Model-specific register support                                                                                                │ │  

  │ │                                                                              <M> /dev/cpu/*/cpuid - CPU information support                                                                                                      │ │  

  │ │                                                                                  High Memory Support (64GB)  --->                                                                                                                │ │  

  │ │                                                                                  Memory split (3G/1G user/kernel split)  --->                                                                                                    │ │  

  │ │                                                                              -*- PAE (Physical Address Extension) Support                                                                                                        │ │  

  │ │                                                                                  Memory model (Flat Memory)  --->                                                                                                                │ │  

  │ │                                                                              -*- 64 bit Memory and IO resources (EXPERIMENTAL)                                                                                                   │ │  

  │ │                                                                              [ ] Allocate 3rd-level pagetables from highmem                                                                                                      │ │  

  │ │                                                                              [ ] Math emulation                                                                                                                                  │ │  

  │ │                                                                              [*] MTRR (Memory Type Range Register) support                                                                                                       │ │  

  │ │                                                                              [*] Boot from EFI support                                                                                                                           │ │  

  │ │                                                                              [*] Enable kernel irq balancing                                                                                                                     │ │  

  │ │                                                                              [*] Enable seccomp to safely compute untrusted bytecode                                                                                             │ │  

  │ │                                                                                  Timer frequency (1000 HZ)  --->                                                                                                                 │ │  

  │ │                                                                              [*] kexec system call                                                                                                                               │ │  

  │ │                                                                              [*] kernel crash dumps (EXPERIMENTAL)                                                                                                               │ │  

  │ │                                                                              (0x100000) Physical address where the kernel is loaded                                                                                              │ │  

  │ │                                                                              [ ] Build a relocatable kernel (EXPERIMENTAL)                                                                                                       │ │  

  │ │                                                                              (0x100000) Alignment value to which kernel should be aligned                                                                                        │ │  

  │ │                                                                              -*- Support for suspend on SMP and hot-pluggable CPUs (EXPERIMENTAL)                                                                                │ │  

  │ │                                                                              [ ] Compat VDSO support                                                                                                                             │ │  

  │ │                                                                                                              
```

----------

## kernelOfTruth

you're having the P5W DH Deluxe, right ?

then you need to enable the memory remap feature in bios   :Idea: 

----------

## Kasumi_Ninja

 *kernelOfTruth wrote:*   

> you're having the P5W DH Deluxe, right ?
> 
> then you need to enable the memory remap feature in bios  

 

Thanks that did the trick   :Very Happy:   :Very Happy:   :Very Happy: 

```
$ cat /proc/meminfo 

MemTotal:      4147772 kB

MemFree:       3578012 kB

Buffers:         13848 kB

Cached:         189312 kB

SwapCached:          0 kB

Active:         281412 kB

Inactive:       152112 kB

HighTotal:     3276288 kB

HighFree:      2851328 kB

LowTotal:       871484 kB

LowFree:        726684 kB

SwapTotal:      979924 kB

SwapFree:       979924 kB

Dirty:            2652 kB

Writeback:           0 kB

AnonPages:      230380 kB

Mapped:          73768 kB

Slab:            17712 kB

SReclaimable:     6360 kB

SUnreclaim:      11352 kB

PageTables:       2908 kB

NFS_Unstable:        0 kB

Bounce:              0 kB

CommitLimit:   3053808 kB

Committed_AS:   595224 kB

VmallocTotal:   118776 kB

VmallocUsed:     17600 kB

VmallocChunk:   101052 kB

```

----------

## Kasumi_Ninja

Ok this is weird. This is the second extra 2 GB memory pair I inserted (the previous one was bad). All looked fine, I rebooted and ran memtest to be certain and memtest revealed all kind of errors. What are the odds of having 2 pairs of fubared memory in succession?! And why is my pc functioning normally? With the previous pair of defective memory I got all kinds of weird segmentation faults.

----------

## frostschutz

memtest86 and memtest86+ can fail sometimes (they do on my new machine, I guess the hardware is too new? doesn't find errors but just gets 'stuck' anyhow), however if memtester (which runs in linux userspace, downside: only part of free ram can be tested) also finds errors then the ram is either bad or your board does not like the ram.

----------

## Kasumi_Ninja

 *frostschutz wrote:*   

> memtest86 and memtest86+ can fail sometimes (they do on my new machine, I guess the hardware is too new? doesn't find errors but just gets 'stuck' anyhow), however if memtester (which runs in linux userspace, downside: only part of free ram can be tested) also finds errors then the ram is either bad or your board does not like the ram.

 

I used memtest from the  Gentoo 2008 livecd. I inserted exactly the same ram as I have already  (Kingston 2 GB 5300). Memtest reported about 45 errors before I exited.

----------

## kernelOfTruth

 *Aniruddha wrote:*   

>  *frostschutz wrote:*   memtest86 and memtest86+ can fail sometimes (they do on my new machine, I guess the hardware is too new? doesn't find errors but just gets 'stuck' anyhow), however if memtester (which runs in linux userspace, downside: only part of free ram can be tested) also finds errors then the ram is either bad or your board does not like the ram. 
> 
> I used memtest from the  Gentoo 2008 livecd. I inserted exactly the same ram as I have already  (Kingston 2 GB 5300). Memtest reported about 45 errors before I exited.

 

I don't want to badmouth gentoo stuff and/or gentoo compiled memtest, but give memtest86+/memtest on the ubuntu alternate and/or livecd a try, that one didn't find any errors for me - whereas the one compiled on gentoo / in conjunction with gentoo always would display errors ...

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## Kasumi_Ninja

 *kernelOfTruth wrote:*   

>  *Aniruddha wrote:*    *frostschutz wrote:*   memtest86 and memtest86+ can fail sometimes (they do on my new machine, I guess the hardware is too new? doesn't find errors but just gets 'stuck' anyhow), however if memtester (which runs in linux userspace, downside: only part of free ram can be tested) also finds errors then the ram is either bad or your board does not like the ram. 
> 
> I used memtest from the  Gentoo 2008 livecd. I inserted exactly the same ram as I have already  (Kingston 2 GB 5300). Memtest reported about 45 errors before I exited. 
> 
> I don't want to badmouth gentoo stuff and/or gentoo compiled memtest, but give memtest86+/memtest on the ubuntu alternate and/or livecd a try, that one didn't find any errors for me - whereas the one compiled on gentoo / in conjunction with gentoo always would display errors ...

 

That is an excellent idea, I will try it asap!

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## Kasumi_Ninja

Well too bad. I got the same results with memtest from buntu   :Sad: 

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## Kasumi_Ninja

I inserted two 2 GB memory banks which passed memtest fine. I think the problems were caused by the memory slots   :Confused: 

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## Kasumi_Ninja

I wonder is it still necessary to have a swap partition if you have 4 GB of memory?

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## zyko

 *Quote:*   

> I wonder is it still necessary to have a swap partition if you have 4 GB of memory?

 

Not unless you have a specific reason, like some special application that you know can use swap beyond your 4 gigs of memory. Heavy duty numerical simulations might be one example. I've seen some machines eat up 16GB of RAM and still swap like crazy, but that was literally rocket science  :Smile: 

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## gerard27

Hi Aniruddha,

I asked myself the same question.

Decided to delete swap and all goes ok.

Change your kernel .config: CONFIG_SWAP =no.

Gerard.

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## muhsinzubeir

got 2G RAM && 2G swap..but im planning to remove the swap as now its half a yr since i built my machine en ive hardly found swap being used....but its not a bad habit to have small amount of swap left...who knows he  :Laughing: 

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## frostschutz

I have 8GB RAM and 8GB swap.

There are some who think that swap is evil and makes the system slow, but they forget that this is only true if the system is swapping non stop around the clock. Moving 100MB of unneeded data to swap once, and back into memory hours later, is something that won't make your system slower at all. But it gives you 100MB of free memory that can be put to a better use like additional cache that improves overall system performance. It will only get slow if you need to swap out and in 100MB of data - per second. (I.e. when you actually do not have enough RAM for whatever you're doing.).

From my point of view, there is no downside at all to a swap partition, so unless you are extremely tight on disk space, you should keep a swap partition around.

EDIT:

There is an interesting discussion on the topic here http://kerneltrap.org/node/3000

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## kernelOfTruth

 *frostschutz wrote:*   

> I have 8GB RAM and 8GB swap.
> 
> There are some who think that swap is evil and makes the system slow, but they forget that this is only true if the system is swapping non stop around the clock. Moving 100MB of unneeded data to swap once, and back into memory hours later, is something that won't make your system slower at all. But it gives you 100MB of free memory that can be put to a better use like additional cache that improves overall system performance. It will only get slow if you need to swap out and in 100MB of data - per second. (I.e. when you actually do not have enough RAM for whatever you're doing.).
> 
> From my point of view, there is no downside at all to a swap partition, so unless you are extremely tight on disk space, you should keep a swap partition around.
> ...

 

is there really 1 : 1  (Ram : swap) needed ?

I have 8 GB, too & 4 GB of ram, is that enough ?

from time to time my sys has already swapped out 1.5 GB 

thanks in advance

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## frostschutz

 *kernelOfTruth wrote:*   

> is there really 1 : 1  (Ram : swap) needed ?

 

No, not unless you have some special requirements for swap (like suspend to disk which uses a swap partition to do it or something).

The only general rule that applies to both RAM and swap and other resources in general is: the more the better.  :Laughing: 

The 8GB swap on my system is mostly unused so from that point of view,  it's a waste of disk space (however I also have >300GB of free space which is even more of a waste). It's only during load spikes that swap gets ever really used. Although load spikes are pretty common in Gentoo, for example a world update with lots of stuff to compile (while you're also browsing, gimping, making a backup of the system, burning a dvd, and whatnot). And it's during those times when swap can be really useful and free up some of your precious memory resources by shunning off currently unused parts to disk.

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## RemcoNL

Yes it helps!

I love having a large filecache: after hours, and even after burning a movie, OpenOffice still starts from my filecache  :Smile: 

And I do like my 2 GB /dev/shm (/tmp is simlinked there) for very fast storing of large temp files  :Smile: 

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## ferg

 *frostschutz wrote:*   

> Be careful about that tmpfs, the speed up should not be that huge as Linux uses free memory for a file cache anyway, and some ebuilds require a lot of space (in case of tmpfs a lot of memory) while they are being installed.

 

I have 3Gb virtual disc for portage tmp and I do have to disable it in order to get OpenOffice to compile.  All other packages seem OK.  Well as long as it's pretty empty when I start.

Cheers

Ferg

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## Kasumi_Ninja

Well, I really don't have a clue whether to enable of disable swap. I am only interested in increasing performance. Most articles about swap on kerneltrap are old (4 yrs) and a lot has changed since then. In the meantime I'll stay on the safe side and keep my swap.

Update:

In the meantime I start to wonder if I shall add another ati 3850 (in crossfire mode) to my rig:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-696831-highlight-.html

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## zeek

Swap is useless on modern hardware.  

In the Pentium 1 era EDO RAM maxed out at 256MB/s and hard disk xfer was 10MB/s.

Now we have 16 GB/s RAM xfer rate and 60 MB/s hard disk.

Notice the difference?  RAM transfer rates have gone up by 60x while hard drives only 6x. Hard drives did not keep pace with RAM and no longer provide a usable alternative to RAM.

I help to maintain a research lab with ~60 servers running Gentoo, 0 have configured swap.  Running without swap is safe and recommended.Last edited by zeek on Mon Mar 12, 2012 6:32 am; edited 1 time in total

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## energyman76b

having some swap never hurts. Even if the system never use it. At some point you will run into BLOATAPP or EXPERIMENTAL-BROKEN-DRIVER with a fat memory leak and it will be nice that you have some ram left to be able to log in as root and kill it instead of a OOM deadlock (yes, the oom-killer should prevent it. But I have seen lots of oom-kills and most of the time it was the wrong app).

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## frostschutz

 *zeek wrote:*   

> Now we have 16 GB/s RAM xfer rate and 60 GB/s hard disk.

 

I think you have at least one typo in there somewhere  :Laughing: 

Yes, RAM is fast. Even more the reason to have it do something useful, instead of being occupied by UnusedBloatyApp for hours.

Of course, in case of servers, that come with boards that support way more than just 4-8GB RAM which is the common limit even for modern desktop boards these days, and in regard to server prices altogether vs. cheap ram prices, you'd put in as much RAM as you could get. If you have 64GB RAM in a server but the server actually needs only 8-16GB RAM for its apps to run, you probably won't ever really see any swap being used. I don't know  :Laughing: 

For desktops, it's useful, even with modern hardware. And even if it's not useful, it does not hurt either, unless you can't spare any disk space. The only swapless system I have is my PDA, because it does not have a disk where it would make sense to put swap on.  :Smile: 

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## gringo

i´ll quote Nick Piggin on this :

 *Quote:*   

> "[...]well it is a magical property of swap space, because extra RAM doesn't allow you to replace unused memory with often used memory. The theory holds true no matter how much RAM you have. Swap can improve performance. It can be trivially demonstrated.[...]"

 

http://kerneltrap.org/node/3202

Also, Rik van Riel posted somewhere several (quite usual) scenarios where swap is almost necessary to not hit some regressions due to linux´s design ( i mean the kernel here of course), but i can´t find the links right now. Note that its not about hitting swap, the kernel expects some swapspace available in order to function properly.

So yes, swap is a good thing to have. At home I have 4 gigs of ram and 512 megs in a loopfile for swapspace, no need to waste a hole partition.

cheers

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## energyman76b

Nick would be correct if swap in linux would not be so god damn slow.

I am all for have some swap for emergencies, but whenever swap is used all and everything starts to slow down a lot. It is faster to load an app from 'normal' disk than to fetch it from swap. For some very perverse reason swap feels like every byte is fetched on its own. By a truck. With punctured tires. On a frozen street.

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## Kasumi_Ninja

 *gringo wrote:*   

> i´ll quote Nick Piggin on this :
> 
>  *Quote:*   "[...]well it is a magical property of swap space, because extra RAM doesn't allow you to replace unused memory with often used memory. The theory holds true no matter how much RAM you have. Swap can improve performance. It can be trivially demonstrated.[...]" 
> 
> http://kerneltrap.org/node/3202
> ...

 

Only this link is very (4 years) old. This is light years in computer terms. I wonder if it is still valid now.

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## Kasumi_Ninja

 *energyman76b wrote:*   

> For some very perverse reason swap feels like every byte is fetched on its own. By a truck. With punctured tires. On a frozen street.

 

Hilarious!   :Laughing:  *Warning your quote may end up in a sig*

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## Kasumi_Ninja

I just posted the following thread:

 *Quote:*   

> Has swap still a use with 4 GB of memory?
> 
> June 19, 2008 - 4:56am
> 
> Submitted by Anonymous on June 19, 2008 - 4:56am.
> ...

 

http://kerneltrap.org/node/16317

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## gringo

 *Quote:*   

> Nick would be correct if swap in linux would not be so god damn slow.
> 
> I am all for have some swap for emergencies, but whenever swap is used all and everything starts to slow down a lot. It is faster to load an app from 'normal' disk than to fetch it from swap. For some very perverse reason swap feels like every byte is fetched on its own. By a truck. With punctured tires. On a frozen street.

 

as far as i understand this, no one here is talking about actually hitting swap, the kernel apparently is written with swapspace in mind for some of it´s internal operations or something like that. 

If there is no swapspace available, you may have problems. Haven´t digged into the code for this myself but Rik´s statements made quite some sense ... but still can´t find them.

 *Quote:*   

> Only this link is very (4 years) old. This is light years in computer terms. I wonder if it is still valid now.

 

i *think* it´s still valid, i *think* there have been no major changes in the kernel in what "swap behaviour" refers for years ( well, swap over nfs and stuff like that but no major reworks), although i have nothing that could hold this statement. 

Otoh there are many that report no problems at all in a swapless system so maybe it´s just time to try out and stress your box to see what happens.

Or maybe time to rise this question again on lkml  :Smile: 

cheers

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## Anon-E-moose

I run amd64, multi-lib, 4 gig mem, no swap, and no problems.

YMMV

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## zeek

 *frostschutz wrote:*   

>  *zeek wrote:*   Now we have 16 GB/s RAM xfer rate and 60 GB/s hard disk. 
> 
> I think you have at least one typo in there somewhere 
> 
> 

 

Whoa that should be 60 MB/s hard disk.  :Embarassed: 

Thanks for pointing that out.

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## ferg

perhaps you could get midway with some RAID10'ed ram discs.....    :Smile: 

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## zeek

 *ferg wrote:*   

> perhaps you could get midway with some RAID10'ed ram discs.....   

 

RAM disks are filesystems in RAM.  I think you meant swap on raid10.  But swap on raid10 wouldn't help out either.  RAM capacity per machine has increased by up to 500x (8MB -> 4GB).

The bandwidth of disks vs RAM has widened by an order of magnitude in the last few years.  The RAM installed in a machine has increased by more than an order of magnitude in the last few years.  swapfiles are noew multiple orders of magnitude less useful than they were just a few years ago.

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## ferg

Hi Zeek,

it was a joke really.  What I meant was that if you want an incredibly fast disc (close to 60Gb/s), then you could create a RAID10 device from 4 Ram discs.  Plese take that in the humourous tone it was intended, I doubt you have raw device access to memory. Although I guess with 4 of those hardware RAM discs (the IDE ones that you plug SDRAM into) you could do.

Mind you using main system ram would not speed things up as the ram discs exist in the same place, and utilise the same bandwidth.

Cheers

Ferg

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