Swap size (was: Disk Layout/Partitioning Practices)

[T. Ribbrock]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2004 at 03:28:19PM +0000, WipeOut wrote:
> My only real comment is on the swap allocation.. I think the 2 X RAM is 
> old school thinking from back in the day when RAM was expensive and a 
> highend server had 128MB of it.. If your system ever needs to used more 
> than about 128 - 256MB of swap space then you seriously need to a) add 
> more RAM or b) offload some of the services on the server to another..

Actually, the whole swap story is a strange one as far as I've seen
it... In the time of kernel 2.0.x, it was indeed advised to have 2xRAM
as a minimum, just for the reasons you mentioned. Later, with 2.2.x,
most people agreed that "RAM+swap" should just be enough to cater for
the maximum of memory usage you expect to see, ever. That's when I
switched to 1xRAM.

However, then 2.4.x came and suddenly, everybody suggested 2xRAM again.
I remember reading about it and there was some reasoning behind it, but
I don't know the details. If someone can shed some light on this, I'd
appreciate it.

Cheerio,

Thomas
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                Thomas Ribbrock    http://www.ribbrock.org 
  "You have to live on the edge of reality - to make your dreams come true!"