[sclug] Running without swap

[Alex Butcher]

On Fri, 20 Jan 2006, Will Dickson wrote:

> I have a dim and distant memory to the effect that, back in the olden days, 
> Linux didn't like being run without swap, even if you had lots of RAM. 
> However, nowadays, RAM is cheap and plentiful, and for high-paranoia 
> situations (where it'd be nice to not have to worry about data persisting in 
> the swap for longer than it should) it seems to me that this ought to be 
> practical.
>
> Anyone know what the score is now?

It'll work, AFAIK, but you'll be wasting memory that could be used for
buffer cache, by keeping pages in memory that could otherwise be swapped
out (e.g. because the owning processes are sleeping).

Of course, if you have many GB of RAM or your sleeping processes are quite
small, this may not be a problem.

> Will.

HTH,
Alex.
-- 
Alex Butcher      Brainbench MVP for Internet Security: www.brainbench.com
Bristol, UK                      Need reliable and secure network systems?
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