[nflug] AMD64 Debian 'Etch' Stability

[Cyber Source]

No problem Ken, thanks for the input. I knew a guy that quotes Dr Seuss 
in his signature couldn't be too bad.....

Ken Smith wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-06-11 at 07:21 -0400, Cyber Source wrote:
>   
>> I was wondering if the swap usage 
>> is related to the swap size in general, not necessarily the ram size.
>>     
>
> No, swap is used only when something needs to be paged out of physical
> memory (and that thing can't be paged back in from some other file on
> the system - executable machine code for example won't be put into swap
> because it can be reloaded from the executable file).  How much swap
> space you have allocated won't play any factor in if/when that occurs at
> all.
>
> As you would know but mentioning for the sake of others, obviously the
> more ram you have the less likely you will be of reaching the point
> you're forced to start paging stuff out.  So in that sense swap usage is
> related to ram size but that's the only sense they're related at all,
> and how much swap space you have allocated won't play a factor in
> that.  
>
> There are only two things that will be effected by the amount of swap
> space you allocate.  The first is the obvious one I'm sure you know but
> I'm not quite sure if you know the second because I've run into some
> quite advanced sys-admins who hadn't realized this one (depends heavily
> on your specific experience).  If the machine crashes it can be told to
> create a crash dump which in turn can be used by a kernel programmer to
> try and debug why it crashed.  A crash dump is done by copying the
> entire contents of physical memory into the swap space as the machine is
> going down, and then copying it out of swap space into files (those
> files usually in /var/crash) during the reboot.  So if you don't have as
> much swap space as you have physical memory the machine can't do a crash
> dump.
>
> And again sorry about the previous message.  Next time I'll try to stick
> strictly to answering your question and not wander off into a
> description of stuff I think you might already know but others on the
> list might not. [ That's not intended as a flame either, but it might
> have contributed to what annoyed you along with the admittedly flippant
> comment I'd made about being a young sys-admin.  I have a bad habit of
> "talking to the list" instead of "talking to the originator" when
> replying sometimes. ]
>
>