Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

illidan.modeler · Joined: 02 Sep 2013 Posts: 35

I use my Slacko in a pen drive in various places on various computers. Some computers are without swap partitions purely machines for MS Windows. When I run Slacko on this kind of computers, will it result in poorer performance compared to one with swap partition?

gcmartin · Joined: 14 Oct 2005 Posts: 6730 Location: Earth

Karl Godt · Joined: 20 Jun 2010 Posts: 4182 Location: Kiel,Germany

Firefox is RAM hungry .

1GB is quite OK for most simple purposes . 2GB is very good .
When I compile large sources on my 1GB RAM machine in Full installation mode , then SWAP is seldom used and if in K sizes often .

512MB should be OK , but I would prefer SWAP then to increase RAM to 1GB .

On an old 224MB RAM machine with no HDD running Quirky-1.1live cd , Seamonkey Browser crashes when opening a second or third tab because of too low RAM .

Bugos in Apps can be RAM demanding , as I had to learn recently with the decimal point delimiter being comma in my LANG , not colon .

mikeb · Joined: 23 Nov 2006 Posts: 11071

In terms of performance running with swap being used is a slow down. But running without enough ram and no swap will cause crashes or hard lockups. If you are running on machines with 1GB+ chances are you will be fine. Apps handling large images like GIMP or an untamed browser can chomp.
Also with puppy on a flash stick ram is shared between system ram usage and the ramdisk for the virtual file system so usage is higher than a more conventional system and say adding software or storing files in /root will take up ram space.

If you did need to use your stick where ram is limited or you need more you could have a save file on the stick (or even partition it for the partition way)...a save file is as fast as a partition on modern kernels.

mike

illidan.modeler · Joined: 02 Sep 2013 Posts: 35

Thanks for your clarifications.

I noticed that Puppy will make use of the swap partition if it's present in the PC's internal HDD.

Swap will be needed when many software applications run simultaniously, in order to switch inactive process to the background and map their memory into swap area. Right?

Can I confgiure Puppy to use swap if it's avaible inside the machine, and to use a swap file if swap partition isn't available?

Karl Godt · Joined: 20 Jun 2010 Posts: 4182 Location: Kiel,Germany

mikeb · Joined: 23 Nov 2006 Posts: 11071

gcmartin · Joined: 14 Oct 2005 Posts: 6730 Location: Earth

You pose a good question.

mikeb · Joined: 23 Nov 2006 Posts: 11071

Ok this is from Lucid...if no swap partition then it tries to load pupswap.swp located in the root of the save drive...

musher0 · Posted: Wed 11 Sep 2013, 17:21 Post subject:

Hello, all.

A couple of infos for the record:

1) windose has 2-3 swap files for various purposes, called
hiberfile.sys, pagefile.sys and the like. I don't know if explaining how
would be on subject, but there's a simple way for any Linux to use
pagefile.sys as a swap file.

2) at boot-up, if Puppy thinks there is not enough RAM and finds no swap file
or partition, it creates a small 256 Mg swap file, to have leg-room at
least until your pupsave file is created.

BFN.

bigpup · Posted: Wed 11 Sep 2013, 23:01 Post subject:

Yes, at bootup, Puppy will automatically detect and use a swap partition or swap file that is on computer.

nic007 · Joined: 13 Nov 2011 Posts: 1668

musher0 · Posted: Fri 13 Sep 2013, 22:03 Post subject:

Hello nic007.

Here are a couple of articles I found on the subject:
http://www.linuxarticles.org/2010/10/linux-swap-space-configuration-using-file/

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linuxquestions-org-member-success-stories-23/sharing-a-swap-file-with-linux-and-windows-109511/
(The first part in blue, the post by a Mr. Hammond)

Attached is also slaxsave.zip taken from
http://www.homesopen.com/slax6/slax-boot-usb-from-cd-6.0.1.iso.
I don't think it's distributed with the newer slax or porteus distros
anymore, but it's always handy to have around.

Watch it! Surprisingly, there are 4 sizes of swap files in there ranging
from 128 Mg to 1 Gb, so make sure you have enough room on your
support drive (especially if a USB drive) when you unzip any one of
them. I'd recommend using the 512 Mb one, which is enough for our
purposes in Puppy.

I don't use any of them anymore since I now have a very large HD
with a swap partition, but a script similar to Mr. Hammond's above
did set the swap file up and it worked fine. If you're interested I'll
dig up this old script.

Another word of caution. The drive I used it on was formatted in
fat32. These swap files will certainly work on fat32 and extX drives,
but I'm not sure if they'll work on a windose ntfs drive right off the bat,
because a ntfs drive has to be opened and maintained open with the
Linux ntfs-3g utility to be written to.

BFN.

musher0

nic007 · Joined: 13 Nov 2011 Posts: 1668

musher0 · Posted: Sat 14 Sep 2013, 11:12 Post subject:

All right, then.