[NBLUG/talk] My new debin server

[Tim C. Lewis]

On Thu, 1 Jun 2006, Chris Palmer wrote:
> Dean A. Roman writes:
>> There is nothing that says you absolutely need a swap partition.  You
>> could eliminate your entire swap partition altogether effectively
>> removing the possibility of swapping.
>
> Thus turning an excessive swapping problem into a problem of applicatons
> randomly dying because they don't have enough memory.

ah, there is a middleground:
/proc/sys/vm/swappiness

echo (or sysctl) a low value (range is 0-100, default is 60) to that and 
the kernel will less actively use the swap that's available unless it 
needs to.  this may or may not be the "right thing to do" depending on 
what kind of use the system in question is getting, and what kind of 
responsiveness you're looking for.  google search for "swappiness" for 
more detailed info...

-tcl.