Do we need SWAP Space?

Question

Hi Folks!
I am running Archlinux 64bit on my System with 4096 Mb RAM. I use my System for Programming (Java, C), Gaming (UT2004, Enemy Territory, True Combat Elite, Doom3, ....), Distributed Computing (Boinc), Email, Surfing the Net, Watching and Converting Videos , Picture processing (Gimp) and Office work in general (Printing, Writing, ...).
There was never a lack of memory on my System and my Swap Space, which have an amount of 2000 Mb, is never used.
I would shrink it to 512 Mb, but i would not delete this partition.
By the way: i do not use the hibernate Funktion. In that case i should give at least 4096 Mb to the Swap Partition.
Here are some interesting Articles about that Problem:
http://sourcefrog.net/weblog/software/l … /swap.html
http://kerneltrap.org/node/3660
http://www.linux.com/feature/121916
What do you thing about this issue?
Greetz
roost

Answer 1

iphitus wrote:In shining's case, something must have been forking off, possibly make starting new compilation processes.
Actually, I just checked some old mails and here are some precisions :
1) the first time, the box was totally unresponsive, and nothing visible had been killed
2) the second time, it killed both firefox and gnome. I suspect I had the compilation running in screen, so that was still going on.
And with firefox and gnome killed, the box was much more responsive
Also I believe that I was using makeflags -j3 in both cases. So probably that does not help with memory usage.
And it could also indeed makes the task of oom killer more difficult.
So if I ever want to compile it again, I can do two things : running outside X to free a lot of mem, and with -j1
Besides, I have only 1gb. So people with 2gb and more probably don't need to care about this.
But I still think that it is better to have some swap space, and have the system slows down because of swap usage in extreme conditions, rather than having the oom killer kill tasks and losing potentially important data / work / whatever.
Now if you know that the maximum memory usage you can achieve doing something productive is lower than your mem, then it is fine.
Actually I have only 1gb and no swap, the only times I had problems is with this octave compilation, and I was not even using the box at this point, I just let it compile, so I did not lose anything.