[Gllug] SWAP over NFS

[Pete Ryland]

On Wed, Apr 09, 2003 at 07:07:15AM +0800, James Bromberger wrote:
> Adrian McMenamin (Adrian at mcmen.demon.co.uk) wrote:
> > Anybody know of a good guide to making this work under 2.4 (2.4.20
> > actually) kernels?
> 
> Err... that would be NFS, the so-so stable network file system, and
> Swap, the virtual memory paged out to disk. Humph. Thinking for a
> second... well, network goes down, not only does the NFS mount become
> unavailable, but suddenly half of the system 'memory' has suddenly
> disappeared, and *bang* over you fall and down you go. Having the system
> memory disappear is more like chopping off half your head than shooting
> yourself in the foot.

Actually, a friend used to have swap on a floppy (on a 4MB RAM diskless w/s)
and if he took the floppy out, the processes trying to access memory that
had been swapped out simply blocked and the rest of the system continued
without any problems whatsoever.  This was a 1.0 or 1.2 kernel iirc.
Apparently it was quite slow when two processes were trying to use swap
since seek times on a floppy are quite poor.

> The only guide I can think of for Swap over NFS is: DON'T! :)

Indeed.  I think I just woke the neighbours with cries of "God NO!" after
reading Adrian's mail.

>  PS: We've released the ISO from Linux.Conf.Au. 3 days of Ogg/Speex
>  recordings. Mirrors around the world. See http://conf.linux.org.au/.

Having attended the first two LCAs, and after "organising" the pub crawl for
the Sydney one, I'm not convinced that recordings of the talks would really
capture the spirit of the event.  Downloading nonetheless. :-)

Pete
-- 
Pete Ryland
http://pdr.cx/

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