From: danielce@mullian.ee.mu.OZ.AU (Daniel AMP Carosone) Subject: more questions about dynamic buffercache (was: Up and Running linux) Date: 28 Aug 1992 04:20:11 GMT
trussell@cwis.unomaha.edu (Tim Russell) writes:
> Well, actually I have 16 MB of RAM, and just for kicks since I have
>tons of disk space (envy me :)) I even put on an 8 MB swap partition. As
>far as I know, I've never come /anywhere/ near even getting into the swap,
>with X running several (8-10) clients and doing kernel compiles at the
>same time.
I've been wondering about this.
I've just reinstalled my linux system on a machine with 12Mb of
memory, and didn't enable any paging space on disk.
However, with dynamic buffercache, would it still be beneficial to
have at least a small amount of swapspace, even if my memory
requirements don't exceed the capacity of silicon?
Will Linux (0.97.1+) page out old data pages in favour of buffer blocks?
I'm thinking of things like login shells that start up emacs and then
do nothing for the next several days, or processes that get left idle
on far-away, forgotten VC's. The text pages are quite possibly going
to be shared, and paged from the executable anyway, but what about
data? A large, forgotten emacs buffer? A memory-intensive program or
perl script stopped for debugging, while compilation goes on
elsewhere?
_______________________________________________________________________________
Daniel AMP Carosone. email: danielce@ee.mu.oz.au snail: 37 Wandin Road
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University of Melbourne. Vox: +61 3 882 8910 Australia