sounder 8, JS on Swap

[Colin Watson]

On Sun, Sep 12, 2004 at 05:59:48PM +0800, John wrote:
> The S8 install is in progress, and I wish to comment on swap partitions.
> 
> I tried without success to perusade the d-i folk that on most peecess 
> (and like Macs and such) where the OS is being installed on a single 
> disk, that a swap partition is a bad idea.
> 
> Rather than repeat my argument here, see:
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2004/08/msg00016.html
> 
> No, I've not done benchmarks. It seems so clear to me I wonder that 
> anyone would challenge my argument in that manner.

Swap partitions aren't there for speed reasons. They're there because if
you don't have swap then the amount of RAM you have is a hard limit on
what you can do, rather than a soft limit; not everybody can
conveniently add more memory, even if they should, and "out of memory"
is a very stark error message.

Moreover, if you have no swap then you can't leave other programs loaded
when one program's working set is close to the amount of RAM you have.
In that case, in fact, having other programs swapped out is not going to
be much of a performance hit (those pages aren't currently being used,
so why would it be?).

This is a sensible default. As ever with sensible defaults, some people
have their own reasons for wanting something different; they can always
use the manual partitioning option and do something else.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                    [cjwatson at canonical.com]