[mythtv-users] How big CF card for frontend?

[David Brodbeck]

Dan Wilga wrote:
> I agree. Whenever Linux has swap available it tends to use little bits 
> of it whether it needs to or not. Any unnecessary writes to a CF card 
> are a bad thing, since they shorten its life.

It does that to free up RAM to use as disk cache.  You can tune it by 
writing a number between 0 and 100 to /proc/sys/vm/swappiness.  Smaller 
numbers mean less swapping.  There's a long discussion of the merits of 
this here:
http://kerneltrap.org/node/3000
But if your goal is to minimize disk activity, and you don't want to 
eliminate swap entirely, "echo 0 >/proc/sys/vm/swappiness" should help. 
  Sometimes it's good to have some swap just as an emergency backup, so 
the out-of-memory killer doesn't whack your X server if you happen to 
run something unusually memory intensive.  (It always seems to whack the 
X server.)