[CentOS] CentOS 5: comment swap in fstab

Fri Nov 9 06:13:21 UTC 2007
finley at privacynetworks.com <finley at privacynetworks.com>

I'm not sure what gave me this idea, but I decided
to comment out the swap partition in /etc/fstab
and reboot my laptop. I did not run swapoff directly at
any time.

I'm running more things now than I would ever dream of
to hammer my 500MB of memory, but I still notice NO
slowdown. This is the best desktop experience I've
ever had for any OS on any hardware!

Here's the first 12 lines in top (CPU)

top - 22:57:28 up  2:06,  1 user,  load average: 1.11, 0.89, 0.88
Tasks:  97 total,   2 running,  95 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 20.2%us,  2.9%sy,  0.0%ni, 76.2%id,  0.0%wa,  0.1%hi,  0.6%si, 
0.0%st
Mem:    449556k total,   441840k used,     7716k free,     9420k buffers
Swap:        0k total,        0k used,        0k free,   159416k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 2921 root      15   0  227m  69m 7312 S 16.2 15.9  22:41.70 X
 3317 finley    15   0  240m  25m 8684 S  3.1  5.8   2:32.73 xine
 3204 finley    15   0  2160  772  564 S  2.2  0.2   2:02.71 top
 3100 finley    15   0  183m  51m  16m S  0.8 11.7   5:03.90 firefox-bin
 3116 finley    15   0  223m  39m 2440 S  0.4  8.9   0:54.26 java_vm
 3264 finley    15   0 32276 9788 7132 S  0.3  2.2   0:23.74 kpat
 3050 finley    15   0 33676  10m 7572 R  0.2  2.3   0:21.28 konsole
 3049 finley    15   0 32080 7620 5668 S  0.1  1.7   0:01.62 kscd
 3399 finley    15   0 57024  25m  16m S  0.1  5.7   0:08.55 konqueror
    1 root      15   0  2028  480  392 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.29 init
    2 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/0
    3 root      34  19     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.06 ksoftirqd/0

Here's the top 12 lines (Mem)

top - 22:58:41 up  2:07,  1 user,  load average: 1.14, 0.92, 0.89
Tasks:  97 total,   3 running,  94 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 25.3%us,  2.9%sy,  0.0%ni, 71.5%id,  0.0%wa,  0.4%hi,  0.0%si, 
0.0%st
Mem:    449556k total,   442156k used,     7400k free,     9648k buffers
Swap:        0k total,        0k used,        0k free,   159160k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 2921 root      16   0  227m  69m 7312 R 20.9 15.9  22:55.56 X
 3100 finley    15   0  183m  51m  16m S  0.4 11.7   5:05.54 firefox-bin
 3116 finley    15   0  223m  39m 2440 S  0.4  8.9   0:54.60 java_vm
 3253 finley    15   0  198m  34m 9.8m S  0.0  7.9   0:07.97 swriter.bin
 3317 finley    15   0  240m  25m 8684 S  2.9  5.8   2:35.17 xine
 3399 finley    15   0 57024  25m  16m S  0.0  5.7   0:08.57 konqueror
 3638 finley    15   0 93632  23m  15m S  0.0  5.4   0:03.80 gaim
 3026 finley    15   0 35180  13m  10m S  0.0  3.1   0:05.42 kded
 3336 finley    15   0 34232  11m 8776 S  0.0  2.7   1:01.01 kuickshow
 3038 finley    15   0 35096  11m 8828 S  0.0  2.7   0:23.91 kicker
 3050 finley    15   0 33676  10m 7844 R  0.4  2.4   0:21.53 konsole
 3264 finley    15   0 32276 9808 7152 S  0.0  2.2   0:23.85 kpat

As you can see, I'm running a KDE environment. I'm going to
try this in a gnome environment tomorrow.

This is on an HP Pavillion ze4800 I purchased at WalMart a bit
over two years ago for ~$900.

>From dmesg:
   AMD mobile AMD Athlon(tm) XP2800+
   Memory: 447836k/457664k available

Linux info:
   [finley at c182 ~]$ cat /etc/issue
    CentOS release 5 (Final)
    Kernel \r on an \m

   [finley at c182 ~]$ uname -a
    Linux c182.pnd.net 2.6.18-8.1.6.el5 #1 SMP Thu Jun 14 17:46:09 EDT
2007 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux

Hope this makes someone else's day!

Steve Finley