swapspace

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 18 October 2014 10:45:48 Colin Law did opine
And Gene did reply:
> 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

Swap I have.  But it is never used as long as I stick with a PAE enabled 
kernel.  It is enabled in the 32 bit PAE enabled version of this 3.16.0 
kernel.

OTOH, okular took me down yesterday, while trying to read thru a 42 
megabyte, 650 page pdf, the USB2.0 stds document.  No clue if it was into 
swap at the time & no way to acess an htop as it was bash & everything it 
started that all died in one swell foop.

No idea if acroread could handle it.  That is the first time okular has 
ever failed me, and it has printed several 450+ page pdf files without 
error.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
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