Sunday, September 25, 2011

Requirement for swap space (or virtual memory), not again

More and more users have more and more memory installed. In order to take advantage of their memory, some users move cache of Firefox or Chrome to memory from their disk, some Linux users move their temp directories to tempfs.

I mentioned MyEclipse needs swap, or virtual memory, during installation. I came across almost the same problem when I installed Oracle Database Express Edition.

This system does not meet the minimum requirements for swap space.  Based on the amount of physical memory available on the system, Oracle Database 10g Express Edition requires 1024 MB of swap space. This system has 0 MB of swap space.  Configure more swap space on the system and retry the installation.

I don't have swap partition or swap file at that time, but the installer ignored its own warning and installed itself successfully. I thank Oracle.

I repeat my point here, swap is not necessary in Linux desktop. Hope those applications that still require swap or virtual memory consider it. For those still not sure whether you can remove swap, please reduce your swappiness to 0 to see if you can live without swap.

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