Re: why swap at all? (what the user feels)

From: Robin Rosenberg
Date: Tue Jun 01 2004 - 14:04:05 EST


On Tuesday 01 June 2004 20.01, David Schwartz wrote:
> > From what I've read previously in this thread, it seems to me that the
> > only major problem with swapping that not all users want file system
> > cache to swap out actual applications (thus making that somewhat aged
> > mozilla window abit laggy).
> >
> > Maybe we could just have a "Allow file system cache to swap out
> > applications checkbox somewhere"?
> >
> > Or, Am I missing something?
>
> In practice, that would make no difference at all. Once physical memory is
> full (and it pretty much will always be so), every memory request (whether

No.

Many people have machines with plenty of RAM (512MB or more is pretty much
standard on new machines), much of which is only used to cache files. The
file cache is the reason the memory is full.

-- robin
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