To swap or not to swap that is the question

[gaf at Blu.Org (Jerry Feldman)]

Good theory, especially in a commercial environment. 
On 7 Oct 2002 at 14:22, Derek D. Martin wrote:
> Through experience, I've formulated the following theory on virtual
> memory configuration.  If you have a good idea of how much RAM
> your applications will use (and you should, either from experience, or
> by pre-implementation testing for an app with which you're not
> familiar), configure your VM to have at least 50% more than you think
> you need, favoring RAM as much as possible.  Unless money is no
> object, in which case I'd just configure double the amount of physical
> RAM I think I'd need, and add a fairly minimal swap partition
> (< 1/2 GB).
> 
> Now, that said, disk space is cheap.  It's much better to have extra
> swap space lying around, than to have some critical application die on
> you because the system ran out of virtual memory, especially on a
> system whose memory usage fluctuates wildly and is hard to predict.
> OTOH, right now RAM is really cheap too; if performance is an issue,
> adding RAM is probably a better investment, as it's really cheap, and
> orders of magnitude faster than disk.  If you can afford it, you
> always want your applications being serviced by physical RAM, rather
> than having to be paged in and out of memory.
> 
> - -- 
> Derek D. Martin
> http://www.pizzashack.org/
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-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Associate Director
Boston Linux and Unix user group
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