On 07/03/2009 05:46 AM, MontyRee wrote:
But, if there is no swap partion at system, what would be happen? that makes the system unstable or not?
That depends on what you're running. As people point out, you can usually get along without one, but doing so is a bad idea in some configurations. If you run a server that's dedicated to any single large application (like dedicated tomcat or database server), then you should have swap at least as large as RAM. Even when you configure the system so that applications stay within the bounds of RAM, fork() will fail in your application if it doesn't have room for a complete second copy of itself in memory. The space won't normally be used, since Linux uses a copy-on-write technique for fork(), but it still requires the space before it will allow fork() to succeed.