To swap or not to swap that is the question

[ron.peterson at yellowbank.com (ron.peterson at yellowbank.com)]

On Mon, Oct 07, 2002 at 03:05:01PM -0400, Jerry Feldman wrote:

> The old rule of thumb was 3 X memory.

Or 2x, or 2.5x...

I believe early 2.4 kernels required an amount of swap equal to ram
*before* you began to increase the size of your VM.  So if your swap was
2x your RAM, your VM would be 2x your RAM.  So if you wanted swap to be
double your RAM (the old rule of thumb) you'd need swap to be 3x your
RAM.

I'm just blowing smoke in a feeble attempt to grok where these 'rules of
thumb' come from.

I agree w/ the poster(s) who said "hdd is cheap - give yourself some
swap space just in case".  Especially on a server, which will have to
handle god knows what unanticipated overload (bugbear print job mayhem,
for example).

You can also create multiple swap partitions that are used in parallel
by using the 'pri' option in fstab.  Just put them on different disks
and give them all the same priority, for example.

-- 
Ron Peterson                   -o)
87 Taylor Street               /\\
Granby, MA  01033             _\_v
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