Re: why swap at all?

[William Lee Irwin III]

On Wed, May 26, 2004 at 12:31:16AM -0700, Buddy Lumpkin wrote:
> This is a really good point. I think the bar should be set at max
> performance for systems that never need to use the swap device. 
> If someone wants to tune swap performance to their hearts content, so be it.
> But given cheap prices for memory, and the horrible best case performance
> for swap, an increase in swap performance should never, ever come at the
> expense of performance for a system that has been sized such that executable
> address spaces, libraries and anonymous memory will fit easily within
> physical ram.
> This of course doesn't address the VM paging storms that happen due to large
> amounts of file system writes. Once the pagecache fills up, dirty pages must
> be evicted from the pagecache so that new pages can be added to the
> pagecache.

If you've got a real performance issue, please describe it properly
instead of asserting without evidence the existence of one.


-- wli
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