Linux Format forums

heiowge · Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2013 12:35 pm Post subject: Swap Chop

I have 2 main machines. The basic specs of both are listed in my signature. What I want to know is... Do I really need a Swap partition on either? If so, will altering the swappiness help, and what is better for me, more swappiness or less?

Thanks

Swap partitions are 4GB and 1GB I think...
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AMD PHENOM II X6, 14 GB DDR3, 500 GB hd, 1GB nVidia card, running Linux Mint 14 KDE / Win 7. Damn thing keeps breaking.

eeepc 1015PX, 1.66 Ghz Intel atom processor, 2 GB DDR3, 320 GB hd running Mint 14 MATE. Running great.

towy71 · Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2013 1:15 pm Post subject:

A swap partition is necessary if you intend to hibernate or suspend either machine, I have 2Gb ram and 4Gb swap on my desktop and 1 Gb ram with 2Gb on my netbook
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still looking for that door into summer

heiowge · Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2013 3:04 pm Post subject:

Then that would be a no. I only ever shut down, restart or log out.
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AMD PHENOM II X6, 14 GB DDR3, 500 GB hd, 1GB nVidia card, running Linux Mint 14 KDE / Win 7. Damn thing keeps breaking.

eeepc 1015PX, 1.66 Ghz Intel atom processor, 2 GB DDR3, 320 GB hd running Mint 14 MATE. Running great.

nelz · Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2013 3:47 pm Post subject:

Linux expects to have swap available, even if it doesn't use it, although some services page startup code to swap purely because it is not needed once the service is running.

As to how much you need and how swappy it should be, that depends on what you use the system for.

heiowge · Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2013 5:30 pm Post subject:

*****@*****-desktop ~ $ free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 14034 7464 6569 0 128 6197
-/+ buffers/cache: 1138 12896
Swap: 3813 0 3813

That surprised me. I had no idea I was using half my RAM! Shocked

I'm only running KDE, Firefox, Transmission and konsole.

I'm not worried. I have plenty of space. I was looking to speed up my netbook and (more importantly) my daughter's netbook. I heard a rumour that Swap doesn't help if you've got enough ram. Both netbooks have 2GB RAM, mine DDR3, hers DDR2. I had thought they were using at most about 1.5GB, since that's all my RAM clocks seem to show.
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AMD PHENOM II X6, 14 GB DDR3, 500 GB hd, 1GB nVidia card, running Linux Mint 14 KDE / Win 7. Damn thing keeps breaking.

eeepc 1015PX, 1.66 Ghz Intel atom processor, 2 GB DDR3, 320 GB hd running Mint 14 MATE. Running great.

heiowge · Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2013 5:40 pm Post subject:

Hmmm...

Why does the system monitor show a usage of 1.1GB and free -m show about 7 times that? Confused

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AMD PHENOM II X6, 14 GB DDR3, 500 GB hd, 1GB nVidia card, running Linux Mint 14 KDE / Win 7. Damn thing keeps breaking.

eeepc 1015PX, 1.66 Ghz Intel atom processor, 2 GB DDR3, 320 GB hd running Mint 14 MATE. Running great.

nelz · Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2013 7:12 pm Post subject:

Buffers and caches, look at the next line in the output of free.
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Unix is user-friendly. It's just very selective about who it's friends are.