Re: Swap DIsks- but not what you think!

squid wrote:

> On the other side I admit that I never ran a server (a real productive
> server) without swap at all for more than a few minutes, just because
> I wanted to use all the RAM for my server duties.

There are some caces where running without swap may be beneficial. Large
scale Squid installations is certainly one of the applications
qualifiying to be such a case.

The issue being how the OS prioritises memory usage. On many OS:es I/O
activity can cause buffers/cache to grow large and thereby causing
applications to be swapped out to disk. In the case of Squid this can
have a negative impact on the performance.

In most other server applications the situation is rewerse: allowing
applications to be swapped out when there is high I/O demand usually
improves overall system performance, but not so in the case of Squid.

--
Henrik Nordtrom
Squid hacker