RAM question for everyone!

[Dan Track]

On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 4:25 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan
<pocallaghan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-01-23 at 10:24 -0600, Michael Cronenworth wrote:
>> -------- Original Message --------
>> Subject: Re: RAM question for everyone!
>> From: Alan Evans <ame.fedora at gmail.com>
>> To: Community assistance, encouragement, and advice for using Fedora.
>> <fedora-list at redhat.com>
>> Date: 01/23/2009 10:19 AM
>>
>> >
>> > This question, along with other recent discussion about swap, leads me
>> > to ask a question in response: Why is everyone so concerned about how
>> > to get away without swap?
>> >
>> > Hard drives are cheap. Why does your server with potentially 10GB
>> > (!!!) of RAM have a hard drive so small that you can't sacrifice a few
>> > GB for swap?
>> >
>> > I'm really curious.
>> >
>>
>> SATA Hard drive speeds - 70 megs to 150 megs a second unless you're RAIDing
>> DDR2 RAM speeds - 6000 megs a second and up.
>>
>> If performance is a key issue, which I'm sure it is, you don't want swap.
>
> In which case the real question is not "how much swap do I need?" but
> "how much RAM do I need to avoid swapping?".
>
> poc

Hi All,

This wasn't addressed to any paricular architecture, it was more of a
query. Why do I even need swap or a large disk if all my app does is
read a few pieces from a database on disk and if I load the database
into RAM is there ever a need to look at the hardisk, given that the
database never changes.

Thanks
Dan