[Gllug] Swap file size

[Lee Blackwell]

For my Sun servers, with 4Gb RAM I use a 1Gb swap file. As there is
usually 50Gb or more online then I don't really worry about 1Gb of space
that might be unused.

I tend to leave some unpartitioned space on the disk, so that if I need
more swap I can use a native swap partition without having to use the
swapon/swapoff stuff.

Of course, these servers are doing a lot of work, e.g. Oracle or a
sendmail gateway.

I'd imagine that the size of swap is also relevant to what the box is
trying to do - so, if your home machine has 512Mb, but you use it for
games and email, maybe a modest swap of 64-128Mb would be appropriate.

As I said earlier, if you run out of native swap space, you can use
swapon/swapoff with a swapfile a a file on your filesystem, but I suspect
this has a performance penalty.

Lee

-- 
Lee Blackwell
Unix Specialist, NCS, 3com IT.
"I'll believe in skepticism when I see it."

On Thu, 31 Jan 2002, Darran D. Rimron-Molloy wrote:

>
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: John Southern
> [...]
> > If I have 512MB Ram do I really use 1GB for Swap?
>
> I have been thinking this exact same thought recently - when machines
> with 64meg of RAM were considered beefy, and 128meg was overkill,
> RAMx2=SWAP seemed sensible, considering swap partitions could only be
> 127meg at this time, it also made alot of sense....
>
> But what is the ruling with "modern" machines?
>
>      -Darran
>
>
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