What if no swap is used?

[ros]

I'm thinking of replacing external HDD with usb key and disable swapping.
We all know that SWAP is not good for flash memory.

What problems may I expect? I'm using latest oleg's firmware, 'torrent' client and samba. Lighthttpd only when needed.

What happens if RAM gets full? Is it only the apllication affected, that needs more ram at that moment, or also other processes that reside in RAM?

Thanks.

[Thornz]

Not really an answer to your question but maybe a helpful suggestion...

I don't know your exact reason for switching to a usb stick but I was on to the same plan (because the hd was too noisy and bulky) until I learned it would force me to disable swapping.
As I like my routers feature-rich, that was not an option so I went looking for a different solution...
I found exactly that in the form of an ultra-portable external hd which is very compact, very silent and powered by the router as well.
Not that I have anything to do with Western Digital, but mine is a WD Passport 160Gb and I bought it for under €90.

Hope this helps!
Thornz

[Tamadite]

Well, I have been using a 1GB USB flash memory for almost 2 years with swap and log on it; no problems so far. I know what theory says but I prefer paying the price of getting problems with the USB flash memory than listening to the hard disk spinning the whole time 24/7/365. I have tried with an auto spin-off hard disk and it is Ok as long as no log is used on it.
BTW, I'm about to upgrade to a 8GB USB flash memory.

On the other hand, swap memory is not native/enabled out of the box on asus firmware which in someway it means that if not used, nothing bad will happen. It is a feature to enhance its performance. Having sufficient swap space enables the system to keep some physical memory free at all times. On other words, you'll get less performance without swap memory.

[KGy]

Hi and sorry my english.

You can use swap without swap partition.
You can create a swapfile on hdd ( on ext3fs partition good, fat32 is bad idea).
Create a swapfile, the size is 512MB (use dd command). And you can format this
file with "mkswap swapfile" and add to system the "swapon swapfile" command.
And no problem for low memory.

bye,
George