swap space

[akonstam at trinity.edu]

On Wed, Oct 05, 2005 at 12:41:46PM +1000, Eduardo Dela Rosa wrote:
> Hi Tina,
> 
> I don't see any reason why you should avoid taking the default.
> When in doubt, always accept the default that installation process
> gives you UNLESS you know what you're doing.
> 
> However, in principle, linux recommends you to allocate 2x the size
> of your physical RAM BUT having a powerful machine as yours (4-way & 16GB
> RAM), I don't see that the same principle applies.
> 
> In real scenario, swap partition would only come to work if (1) you
> are running a memory-thirsty application, (2) a program that
> processes voluminous transaction that requires serializing data
> onto your harddisk, or (3) your application has memory leak. Either
> of the 3 will definitely exhaust your memory which will put swap
> partition (swapping in/out) into work. Also, note that frequent
> swapping in/out may mean problem with one of your resources and
> would heavily affect performance.
> 
> cheers.
> 
The above is not exactly true. The swap partition is part of the
normal paging in and out of memory that Linux does. Classically it is
not part of the virtual memory model but it turns out that retrieving
a page from the swap partition is faster that retrieving a page from
the normal disk partition because of special addressing to swap area.
But I agree that with this much memory on each processor maybe paging
is at a minimum.
-------------------------------------------
Aaron Konstam
Computer Science
Trinity University
telephone: (210)-999-7484