Swap problems

[Dake K. Odzangba]

On Sunday 08 February 2009 13:36:33 lee wrote:
> Brian McKee wrote:
> > On Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 6:30 AM, Dake K. Odzangba <odzangba at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Hello, I do not have a swap partition (or file) because I've got 2GB of
> >> physical ram. Yet the output of free tells me:
> >
> > What's in your fstab?  and what is the output of 'swapon -s' ?
> >
> > Swap isn't evil you know, just because you have 2 gig of ram doesn't
> > mean swap wouldn't be useful, and having swap is better than not
> > having swap.
> >
> > I'd set up a gig or two of swap in a file or partition if I was you.
> >
> > Brian
>
> It is always better to have a swap partition than not, I have 4gigs of
> ram and still run a swap and have used it on more than occasion.

My fstab looks like so:
> proc            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0
> # /dev/sda1
> UUID=e1e58f09-45f4-4cd5-aa37-22c75f3a0e8c /               ext3    relatime,errors=remount-ro 0       1 
> # /dev/sda3
> UUID=34a9d5e0-b42f-48c3-802c-217ddbc33169 /media/silo     ext3    relatime       0       2 
> /dev/scd0       /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0       0 
> /dev/fd0        /media/floppy0  auto    rw,user,noauto,exec,utf8 0       0

And swapon -s says:
> Filename				Type		Size	Used	Priority
> /dev/ramzswap0                          partition	516080	24628	100

On Sunday 08 February 2009 14:56:19 Smoot Carl-Mitchell wrote:
> Your problem may be a lack of swap space.  The vmalloc error messages
> you see are referring to the kernel virtual memory allocator.  You are
> either exceeding the size limit for kernel virtual memory or as you try
> to use more kernel virtual memory, you have run out of physical memory
> and there is no place to page out idle user pages to make room for the
> kernel vm pages.  kernel vm pages cannot be paged and must remain locked
> in physical memory.
>
> I'd try adding a swap file first and see if that resolves the problem.

Now that I realize what is going on, I'm thinking of bumping my ram up to 4gb and adding swap but I still do not like the fact that the system went ahead to create and _use_ swap space even after I chose not to use swap. A sensible reminder in my logs (or 
even a pop up) that I need swap space would have sufficed... especially since compcache is choking on whatever it's choking on. 

Thanks for the help. :)
-- 
Odzangba,
Blog: http://odzangba.wordpress.com
Registered Linux User #431909
Registered Linux Machines: #337242 #363374 #392526
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