[Bradford] is it normal ?

[John R Hudson]

> 
> From: "Richard Thomas" <xpd259 at gmail.com>
> I have  2gig of ram
> i have conky running to monitor the system , when I used 
gentoo linux I
> noticed that the swap was in use most of the time even if 
only a tiny amount
> 
> but since i moved to ubuntu 8.4 & 8.10 beta it does not 
touch the swap and i
> was just concerned
> so thank you for the quick reply
> 
Is this just a matter of time? When CP/M came out 
programmers used all sorts of tricks to page things between 
disk and memory. Then CP/M3 brought paging for nearly all 
the OS allowing a lot more options to be available with 
only, notionally, 64K RAM.

At first 640K on a PC seemed huge but people were soon 
wanting to page things in high memory and, as memory grew, 
paging became more widely used but was limited by the 16K 
size of pages.

So, at some point, I'm not sure when, Microsoft introduced 
paging to disk to cope with the ever larger programs people 
were writing.

The specialised swap space on Linux was a recognition that 
that would be needed for the foreseeable future. But most 
current programs were written when 2G was a rare for 
desktop computers.

Will a time come when people want to do even more memory 
intensive things on desktop computers and swap will once 
more be called on?

John


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