Re: How do I determine appropriate swapspace settings? And other partitioning questions.

From: Paul Sherwin (paulSPAM_at_paulsherwin.co.uk)
Date: 02/09/05 

Date: Wed, 09 Feb 2005 15:01:16 GMT

On , Morningdew <yahooaddyismorning42dew@spam.free> wrote:
>
>See, at least three times now I have had my system schitzotically freeze
>up on me when that memory ticker hit 100%. It starts to "stutter", then
>gets to where I get a half-second of life between 30-second to several
>minute seizures. Even at a console, outside of X. Firefox with lots of
>tabs was part to blame once. Totem running a downloaded SWF another
>time. Come to find out that on my 32-bit install, I didn't have either
>swap partition in the /etc/fstab file. I fixed that but have not maxed
>out to reproduce the problem yet. I'm sure I'll get to test with the
>swap space soon, though.

This shouldn't happen when you start to swap, and it suggests you
didn't have your swap partition enabled properly. You *will* get a
performance hit though.

>Too broke to joke, so more memory is not happening real soon. Why does
>my Linux barf and sputter when physical memory gets full? You would
>think it would have some more graceful contingencies. Perhaps my disk
>cache (assuming that's what the "cache" portion is) is not configured
>properly and needs adjusting. Ugh. Thanks for the reply, though.

'cache' is filesystem cache. Linux will use free memory to cache the
filesystem. A large 'cache' figure indicates you have lots of free
memory, not that you're running out. It will get smaller as processes
grab more memory. What matters is how much space is being used on your
swap partition - if this is less than a couple of megs, your memory
configuration is fine.

Best regards, Paul 

--
Paul Sherwin Consulting     http://paulsherwin.co.uk

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