[mythtv-users] My MythTV journey

Jarod C. Wilson jcw at wilsonet.com
Wed Dec 24 04:10:42 EST 2003


On Dec 23, 2003, at 23:59, David Rees wrote:

> Jarod C. Wilson wrote:
>> On Dec 23, 2003, at 20:11, Brian Scully wrote:
>>> The swapfile is on the disk.  My question was: if it is in fact the
>>> kernel's cache that is filling my memory, Why would the kernel
>>> maintain that information on disk to save it from being read from
>>> disk?  That was my original question.
>> It could be some program that was loaded into memory long ago, and 
>> hasn't been accessed in ages. Storing and fetching a program's memory
>> out of swap is usually faster than killing and restarting the entire
>> program.
>
> Additionally, if the kernel has swapped out a program, even if you 
> suddenly end up with a lot of free memory, the kernel will not bother 
> to attempt to load programs in from swap.  The logic there is that 
> swapping programs in takes work, why bother when I will probably have 
> to swap it back out again and not even use it?

And what he said. ;-p

> If you are sure you have enough memory, just disable swap altogether, 
> there are some types of workloads that it the kernel does not handle 
> very well and will result in excessive swapping.

Just wanted to add that my dual Athlon workstation w/1.5GB of RAM had 
zero swap in use (but has a 1.5GB swap partition available). It used to 
be the case that some things didn't run well if there wasn't any swap, 
but I believe most of that has been remedied...

Oh, and my MythTV box has 512MB of RAM, currently 4.4MB "free" and 71MB 
of swap usage after 10 days of uptime and umpteen recordings. I've got 
36 recordings scheduled in the next 5 days (Bond marathon, misc holiday 
crap, and normal programming), so I'll have to see where its at 5 days 
from now... :)

-- 
Jarod C. Wilson, RHCE

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