[K12OSN] Quick Question about Swap partitions

Huck dhuckaby at paasda.org
Fri Aug 3 15:31:34 UTC 2007


No such thing as too much swap...it just won't get used.

but back in the old days of linux your swap was double your RAM...
now days...you should be able to tune it(because we have SOOOOO MUCH RAM 
available now) to have just as much as you'd need...

I seriously doubt you will ever touch 10GB of swap with 16GB of RAM 
already in the machine...perhaps 2 GB..

Jim Kronebusch wrote:
>> It depends on the use pattern, but on machines I've seen as you get 
>> close to 2 gigs into swap the machine will be so slow and unresponsive 
>> that you'll probably reboot it before it would recover - if it ever 
>> does.  The main point is that you need enough RAM. Swap will keep the 
>> machine from crashing if you run short momentarily but its not a real 
>> substitute.
> 
> So then theoretically is there a problem with having too much swap available?  I want to
> be sure I have enough in a just in case scenario, but if too much will also slow things
> down I want to keep it to a minimum.  
> 
> For example let's say you have a system with 16GB RAM and a 2GB swap, would this perform
> any differently than a machine with 16GB RAM and 10GB swap?  If both perform the same,
> and you have enough space, wouldn't the setup with more swap be safer if a sudden high
> use case came about?  Obviously if events kept repeatedly using all the RAM and digging
> deep into swap usage, you would add more RAM for the future and hope to stay out of swap
> completely.
> 




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