Linux Format forums

Re: Swap Chop

nelz — Sun Feb 17, 2013 7:12 pm

Author: nelz

Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2013 7:12 pm

Buffers and caches, look at the next line in the output of free.

Re: Swap Chop

heiowge — Sun Feb 17, 2013 5:40 pm

Author: heiowge

Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2013 5:40 pm

Hmmm...

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

Re: Swap Chop

heiowge — Sun Feb 17, 2013 5:30 pm

Author: heiowge

Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2013 5:30 pm

*****@*****-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! 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.

Re: Swap Chop

nelz — Sun Feb 17, 2013 3:47 pm

Author: nelz

Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2013 3:47 pm

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.

Code:

free -m

will show how much real and swap memory you are using. Generally a lower swappiness setting gives a more responsive system when there is RAM to spare.

If you are so short of disk space that you are considering repartitioning your drive to reclaim an extra 1GB, you should be more concerned about filesystem fragmentation that swap.

Re: Swap Chop

heiowge — Sun Feb 17, 2013 3:04 pm

Author: heiowge

Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2013 3:04 pm

Then that would be a no. I only ever shut down, restart or log out.

Re: Swap Chop

towy71 — Sun Feb 17, 2013 1:15 pm

Author: towy71

Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2013 1:15 pm

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

Swap Chop

heiowge — Sun Feb 17, 2013 12:35 pm

Author: heiowge

Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2013 12:35 pm

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...