Swap File

[johnathonm]

Hi everyone,

I was wondering is there a way to force the router to start using the swap file for some of it's functions. Moreover, are we limited to a 2 gig swap file?

Thanks,

J

 

[ColinTaylor]

No and No. But if you need to use that much swap space your router will probably grind to a halt.

# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        255656     223996      31660          0       2340     176876
-/+ buffers/cache:      44780     210876
Swap:      4194300          0    4194300

 

[kfp]

What exactly are you trying to run on your router if I may ask?

 

[johnathonm]

What exactly are you trying to run on your router if I may ask?

I am trying to free up some of my memory on the AC68U Extreme. Merlin's firmware seems to push it close to only 60-80 MB free of the 512 MB of ram.

I am running skynet, pixelserv and ad-block solution, but it's near capacity without even having them installed. I managed to write a script to clear the memory/caches and I disabled all the trend micro software. This freed up quite a bit but I have the swap file just sitting there.

I also want to use my router for me things but am not exactly sure what I can. Also, I am getting some performance anomalies with my upload and download speeds on this router which I haven't been able to pin down. I can't do much with ifconfig but it looks like there is a Asus or Broadcom tool compiled within the code: ethctl on the router which has a lot more power/control as it seems to give god access to the ethernet ports via /rom/etc/init.d/switch.sh. The wireless modules, and other broadcom modules, are being injected via bcm-base-driver.sh located in /rom/etc/init/d/bcm-basedrivers.sh.

I am basically trying to tweak the hell out of it and playing at the same time.

 

[johnathonm]

For example you can turn off powersaving on the switch with ethctl phy serdespower ethX

 

[ColinTaylor]

Linux's memory management is vastly more efficient than a human being's manual attempts. The router can free up cache/buffer in a matter of microseconds if it needs to. By manually flushing caches you are just hurting performance.

 

[johnathonm]

Then with pwrctl you can disable all the nasty save the planet features that slow down the system.

 

[johnathonm]

Linux's memory management is vastly more efficient than a human being's manual attempts. The router can free up cache/buffer in a matter of microseconds if it needs to. By manually flushing caches you are just hurting performance.

I was simply running the the cache flush built into the system. It's ok though because it didn't carry over through the reboot.

 

[FTC]

Hi, as long as you have the swap functionality active (with swapon command) it will start being used whenever needed (i.e when there is not enough physical memory). There is no need to do further tinkering. Those portions of memory that need to reside in physical memory are already declared as non-swappable within the module that allocates them.. so I assume that you do not see the swapper usage grow either because you did not activate it or because your router did not exhaust the available memory yet.