swapspace

[Colin Law]

On 18 October 2014 15:32, Gene Heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com> wrote:
> On Saturday 18 October 2014 10:10:08 Colin Law did opine
> And Gene did reply:
>> On 18 October 2014 13:59, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > On 18 October 2014 14:52, Oliver Grawert <ogra at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>> >> how did you set up /etc/swapspace.conf (note the manpage talks about
>> >> it) ...
>> >
>> > The Debian/Ubuntu package just gives you a ready-rolled one. I've
>> > seldom tweaked it.
>>
>> I have looked at/etc/swapspace and it is completely commented out.  In
>> /etc/init.d/swapspace the options passed on start are just to run in
>> daemon mode and make a pidfile, so basically it is running on
>> defaults, whatever they are.
>>
>> Colin
>
> Interesting Colin, I don't even have that file on any of my 10.04.4 LTS
> machines.  swapspace is available but was not installed.

If you have not installed it then it is not surprising that it is not there.

> Even on the
> memory limited (2Gb installed) machine controllers out in the shop. Had a
> power bump early last week so uptime on the shops machines is about 5
> days, but I do not see swap actually being used on these machines.
>
> If swap is not being used, I don't see the need.  Please shine a light on
> this.

If it is not being used then you don't need it, at that time.  If your
machines are always performing the same task and always have enough
memory then no need to worry.  For a general purpose machine that
performs a variety of tasks the risk is that you perform some
combination of activities that requires and unusual amount of ram.
Without swap you will then be in trouble.

Colin