[rhn-users] RHEL AS21 or AS3: is it safe to use swapoff on a live box?

[Michael Grice]

* Doerbeck, Christoph <Christoph.Doerbeck at FMR.COM> [050127 13:00] wrote:
> Pretty simple question:
> 
> Is it safe to run swapoff on a running box and expect a swap file to
> flush and relocate to other swapfiles?
> 
> Over time, we've had a number of systems which had small swap files
> added to relieve an immediate problem.  Now we would like to simply
> create a larger default swapfile and offline the smaller ones.
> Ideally we would prefer not to shutdown/reboot the servers.  All boxes
> are either AS21 or AS3...

In theory, it should work fine, at least as long as you leave enough
swap to handle the swap space in use. Ideally, it would be swapping as
little as possible when you did it, so stopping or restarting swap-heavy
applications might not be a bad idea; when I've moved around swap
partitions of swap files, I've done this. 
--Michael