User Feedback :: Swap problem in dsl-2.0



I happen to have a ~600MB swap partition on my hd that I don't need for dsl since I have 1GB ram; dsl finds and enables it unless I boot with 'noswap'.

In dsl-1.5 toram it didn't matter whether this swap was on or off - it never got utilized anyway as there was plenty of ram.  So I forgot about it.

On dsl-2.0 toram, when copying the source tarball for dsl-2.0 (36.9mb) from my pendrive to /home/dsl with emelfm, at first nothing happened, though the copy seemed to be very slow.  Then the center of the emelfm display vanished (as if something was hanging) and the yellow swap use bar on the dock app shot up to 642560 and stayed there after the copy had finished (for the first time  - it's always been zero).

# vmstat -s
     1033364  total memory
     1020040  used memory
      478892  active memory
      468976  inactive memory
       13324  free memory
        3916  buffer memory
      555164  swap cache
      642560  total swap
      388688  used swap <--*
      253872  free swap
       46187 non-nice user cpu ticks
           0 nice user cpu ticks
        7028 system cpu ticks
      315833 idle cpu ticks
           0 IO-wait cpu ticks
      627920 pages paged in
      421423 pages paged out
           2 pages swapped in
           0 pages swapped out
      494433 interrupts
     3081695 CPU context switches
  1133531356 boot time
        4292 forks

Doing

# swapoff -a
# swapon -a

frees up the swap again (back to 0 *) as follows:

#vmstat -s

     1033364  total memory
     1018628  used memory
      476488  active memory
      467636  inactive memory
       14736  free memory
        3916  buffer memory
      939852  swap cache
      642560  total swap
           0  used swap <--*
      642560  free swap
       57010 non-nice user cpu ticks
           0 nice user cpu ticks
        8127 system cpu ticks
      499082 idle cpu ticks
           0 IO-wait cpu ticks
      628860 pages paged in
      421483 pages paged out
           3 pages swapped in
           0 pages swapped out
      719936 interrupts
     3825471 CPU context switches
  1133531356 boot time
        4297 forks

While I can always keep the swap off, I don't think swap should be getting utilized for a file copy onto my ramdisk when I have 1GB ram.  Some extensions are loaded during boot but none of these caused this before.
Never mind.  On rebooting, this issue seems to have gone away (good).  Something to do with transitioning from 1.5 to 2.0.  Mystery.
I spoke too soon.  It hasn't gone away.  Much more swap than ram is still being utilized for largish file copies.
DSL now utilizes a portion of a swap partition (if available) to add to its ramdisk.  This is to prevent or postpone problems resulting in the ramdisk filling up.  So copying large files into /home/dsl would affect both ram and swap.

I think this was in 1.5 too, so maybe that's not the issue  ???
Hmm...

Seems like the solution is to boot with

dsl toram noswap

if you don't want to use the swap.
Next Page...
original here.