[vox-tech] ssd and swap

[Brian Lavender]

On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 10:13:09AM -0500, Chanoch (Ken) Bloom wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-05-26 at 07:34 -0700, Scott Miller wrote:
> > Anyone using an SSD? I've got one on the way to use as a boot drive,
> > and am pondering not having swap at all. Is this crazy?
> > 
> > In the Windows world I see persons advising turning off the Windows
> > page file when using an SSD.
> > 
> > I have a lot of ram: 8GB. :) But is it risky to not have a swap?
> > Thanks for your input,

[snip]
> 
> The time when I *do* touch swap is when I have some sort of memory leak
> -- typically in a program I or one of my students wrote -- and the
> computer allocates all of its RAM *very* quickly. 

Hmm, that sounds like my MS project at one point. Perhaps that is the
reason for the quiet response from my advisor. 

You can temporarily add swap for instances like this[1]. The following
will add 1 GB of swap.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024 count=1048576
mkswap /swapfile
swapon /swapfile

when done

swapoff /swapfile

[1] http://www.linux.com/news/software/applications/8208-all-about-linux-swap-space


-- 
Brian Lavender
http://www.brie.com/brian/

"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to
make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other
way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."

Professor C. A. R. Hoare
The 1980 Turing award lecture