[GRLUG] Solid State Drives

[John-Thomas Richards]

On Mon, Dec 01, 2008 at 08:04:45AM -0500, Collin Kidder wrote:
> Tim Schmidt wrote:
> > Quite true.  There are always pages (in ram) of cruft that must be
> > there, but will either never or nearly never be accessed.  Getting it
> > out of ram and onto disk frees up those pages for use by more actively
> > accessed information, or just more file caching.  Either way, having a
> > swap file _always_ increases performance.  The question is by how
> > much.
> >
> > A desktop with even a Gb or two of ram can benefit quite a bit from a
> > swap partition (especially if you have long-running, infrequently
> > accessed processes - like a couple firefox windows with a lot of tabs
> > open).
> >
> > On the other hand, we have a machine here with 32Gb ram that doesn't
> > benefit much from a swap partition.  It still has one, and uses it,
> > but only for said crufty pages.  As I look at it right now, it's using
> > 140kb of swap.  35 pages.  Seems tiny and insignificant compared to
> > 32Gb...  until you need it.
> >
> > --tim
> >   
> There really is no danger in leaving cruft in RAM so long as there is 
> still free RAM. It is only when the RAM has been nearly exhausted that 
> things need to be removed. It's a balancing act because it takes a long 
> time to save things to swap and a long time to get them back (compared 
> to RAM speed.) A tiny bit of swap usage (say, upwards of 10-15% of your 
> RAM size or 250MB whichever is smaller) can help things out. Past that 
> it's an albatross around your neck and you just need more RAM.

I have two GB RAM on my laptop and almost never access swap.  Currently,
with Firefox running along with several xterms, a couple other gui apps
and a bunch of e17 modules loaded, I have 667,888k of RAM free with 0k
of swap used.  The only time I ever see the swap partition used is when
basketbawful (the *best* NBA blog there is) has, like, 20 youtube videos
in one post.  Sometimes I wonder why I have a swap partition.  Then
again, it seems like I completely over did it with a 2GB swap.  Is there
any benefit to reducing it (other than freeing up some disk space, which
is not an issue)?
-- 
john-thomas
------
All restraints upon man's natural liberty, not necessary for the simple
maintenance of justice, are of the nature of slavery, and differ from each
other only in degree.
Lysander Spooner, lawyer (1808-1887)