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