[K12OSN] Quick Question about Swap partitions

[R. Scott Belford]

Interesting Note.  For my home mail/web/familytree server, I have my 
swap mirrored across RAID1 on two separate drives.  Some time ago either 
the drives or the cables or the ide channels died.  This mobo has 6 ide 
channels, and my RAID arrays are spread amongst them, so the system is 
still working.  It has no swap and usually uses most or all of its RAM.

--scott


Huck wrote:
> 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.
>>
>