What is it?
swapd is a dynamic swapping manager for Linux.
It provides the system with as much swap space (virtual memory) as is
required at a particular time by dynamicly creating swap files. This is more
convinient than using fixed swapfiles and/or partitions because they (a) are
unused most of the time and are just taking up disk space; and (b) provide a
limited amount of virtual memory.
This comment from Gabor Z. Papp is a good example of swapd can do:
With 128MB memory my server totally freezed 4 times after
3-4 minutes. Just starting some memory hog application, and
its over. With swapd works fine. :)
Who made it?
The author of swapd is Neven Lovric <neven@lovric.net>.
Which license was it released under?
swapd was released under the GNU General Public License, version 2.
What's the latest version?
The latest version is 0.2 (May 21, 2000).
This is the CHANGELOG.
Where can I get it?
The official swapd archive is at ftp.linux.hr
in /pub/swapd.
The enhanced Debian package is available at http://packages.debian.org/stable/admin/swapd.
Installation notes
If you choose to install a binary package, there are some things you should
do:
- Take a look at /usr/local/etc/swapd.conf and change what is neccesary.
- It is highly recommended that you change MAX_SWAPFILES to 64 or
more in /usr/src/linux/include/linux/swap.h and recompile the kernel. If you
don't do this, swapd will not be able to allocate any more than 8 swap
files, in which case there's not much point using it.
- Add /usr/local/sbin/swapd to, for instance, /etc/rc.d/rc.local to run
swapd automaticly at startup.
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