Fedora Users — Re: Q about swap size

On 07/11/2010 09:10 AM, Robert G. (Doc) Savage wrote:

I've been running Fedora on my old Thinkpad A22p (P-III/M w/512MB) since FC4 or before, upgrading from one version to the next using the same partition sizes. For F13 I increased the size of /boot, but kept swap at 1GB:
# fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000304c6

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1          64      512000   83  Linux
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2              64       14463   115658752   83  Linux
/dev/sda3           14463       14594     1048576   82  Linux swap / Solaris
The last couple of releases have run agonizingly slowly with very high load averages (between 2.x and 10.x).

I just read http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/13/html/Installation_Guide/s2-diskpartrecommend-x86.html
which recommends a minimum of 2GB swap size for memory sizes up to 4GB. I've been using 2x RAM for swap size ever since the 2.6 kernel was introduced. At the moment (running 'yumex') 'top' indicates:
top - 10:43:15 up 2 days, 6 min,  5 users,  load average: 8.62, 6.84, 6.26
Tasks: 244 total,   7 running, 237 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 60.7%us, 23.5%sy,  9.2%ni,  0.0%id,  0.0%wa,  5.4%hi,  1.3%si,  0.0%st
Mem:    509800k total,   502624k used,     7176k free,    16280k buffers
Swap:  1048568k total,   317372k used,   731196k free,   101944k cached
This indicates only about 30% of my 1GB swap is being used. Would increasing that to 2GB have any affect on the load average performance?

--Doc Savage
Fairview Heights, IL

Don't run Gnome/KDE desktops - they're memory hogs. Instead, try XFCE - it's much lighter and faster (fewer features, though).
You have ~800MB of virtual memory used (mem used+swap used) with nothing but yumex.
I have Thunderbird and Firefox and several small programs open; my virt memory usage is at ~600MB. The rest of my 2G is buffers and caches.
Mem: 2061244k total, 1999948k used, 61296k free, 303296k buffers Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 917156k cached

As far as swap, keep it at 1G, it's a reasonable setting with your hardware.
With my 2G RAM, I have the swap partition at 2G, but keep it turned off most of the time -- the programs I open rarely, if ever, fill up the 2G and it's faster to not use the swap when you don't need it. But that's just me, not a recommendation of any kind :)

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