On Fri, 2006-02-03 at 09:45 -0600, Chad Walstrom wrote:
> Does anyone recall how Linux performs without swap?  I recall having a
> problem with this type of setup in 2.4 way back when, but I don't
> remember the details.  If this is a server, you probably have thrown
> lots of RAM at it anyway.  Having a swap partition probably isn't
> necessary.  It looks like Kernel Trap had an article on this one. [1]_
> So, in May of 2004, the best performance for your machine is achieved
> with a swap.  Is this still true today?

I suppose it depends on your workload. 2.6 kernels are much better about
not using swap just because its there. (Though notably a few years back
there was a fun bug in the OOM killer when you ran without swap, where
it would kick in and start killing things when you were only at 50%
memory usage, that has been since fixed...) I have a system with 384mb
RAM running FC4 that I use for MythTV and playing DVDs and videos with
Xine. And sometimes MAME. It ran for months straight without ever
touching swap, so I just disabled swap. Swapping absolutely kills MythTV
anyway.
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