FC2 and Swapping

[James Wilkinson]

Mike McMullen wrote:
> Does FC2 ever swap?

Definitely.

> I upgraded a mail server from FC1 to FC2. It
> runs MailScanner, ClamAV, SpamAssassin and is our IMAP mailbox
> store.
> 
> Under FC1 with our load on a system with 512MB of memory it was
> not unusual to see 35MB to 100MB of swap utilized. Under FC2
> it is 0.

There was a lot of work put into the memory management system during
the development of the 2.6 kernel. And although 512 MB isn't very much
these days, your applications aren't massively changed from when this
was a stupidly large amount of memory.

So it's quite possible that the kernel just doesn't think it's
worthwhile writing anything to swap. (Note that a lot of data loaded
from file won't get written to swap. If it's not been changed, then the
kernel will just reload it from disk when it's needed.)

James.

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E-mail address: james | Beam me up, Scotty, there's no intelligent life
@westexe.demon.co.uk  | down here!