Re: why swap at all?

[John Bradford]

Quote from William Lee Irwin III <wli@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> On Thu, May 27, 2004 at 08:31:26AM -0400, Piszcz, Justin Michael wrote:
> > If I have 16GB of ram should I use swap?
> > Would swap cause the machine to slow down?
> 
> Yes. You want swap so you can physically relocate anonymous pages in the
> rare case one ends up somewhere it could cause memory pressure against
> allocations that can only be satisfied by a restricted range of memory.

I think you are assuming a 100% perfect VM system.  In practice, if the machine
isn't heavily loaded, unnecessary swap is more likely to cause, (slight, and
possibly negligable), slowdowns, than bring any noticable performance benefit.

John.
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