On 5 March 2015 at 10:29, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
On 05/03/15 00:12, Mark Rogers wrote:
Most motherboards max out at 16GB RAM and I always find the O/S still finds some use for swap even if there's RAM available.
I'm *Very* surprised to hear this. It's not my experience.
The 16GB limit or the O/S swapping?
On the former, that probably indicates I use cheap motherboards :-)
On the latter, it might be the way I read the output from (eg) htop but I rarely see swap usage at zero, even on a clean boot before much RAM is in use.
You'd hope, but if you're saying that your O/S is using swap space when there's RAM free then I wouldn't bank on it! You know BTW that if you have multiple swap devices/files, you can set the priority of which gets used? I think you can do it with the swap or is it swapon command.
I would get rid of the disk based swap and only give it SSD swap to play with, limiting its choices somewhat!
Incidentally, on my low-powered under-resourced craptop, lubuntu decided in its infinite wizdom to install compressed ram-based (pseudo-)swap space on "zram" drive. It seems to work well. That's higher priority than my actual swap partition, consequently the physical swap rarely gets used.
Thanks, that might be worth a look. I'd like to see more use of memory and disk compression generally; both often bring performance gains.
I'm sure SSD will give you faster boot time and program loading time. It will work swap files/partitions faster than a regular HDD too. It'd be interesting to see comparisons of otherwise identical machines with/without more RAM or SSD, but I'm sure it'd be hard to manage a fair comparison. Let us know how fast things get.
Will do!