[sclug] Running without swap

[Will Dickson]

Alex Butcher wrote:
> 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.

Thanks, Alex - that was what I wanted to hear :-). For the kind of 
situation I was thinking of, the latter would apply, and so probably 
would the former; wasting a few MB of RAM wouldn't be an issue.

Will.