Re: To swap or not to swap?

[Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@linux01.gwdg.de>]

On Jun 5 2007 00:35, Mike Richards wrote:
>
> In my research on this matter I've come across various comments by
> people saying that getting rid of swap entirely will hurt performance
> somehow, but on these servers I'm  seeing very little swap used in the
> first place, so I'm not seeing how that's really possible. But to
> avoid that being an issue, let's suppose I give each server 32MB of
> swap to cover the occasional usage. Is there any reason *not* to go
> the route of minimizing swap in order to also minimize downtime?

Generally yes. You want as much swap as the base daemons/programs take up in
RAM. Any [user] program should probably be allowed to max out your physical RAM
- the daemons go to swap in the meanwhile (mostly works with idle servers). A
program that requires more memory than physically present is anyway going to
swap in and out sometime later, degrading performance to a halt, as you
describe.

> The consensus these days seems to be that since hard drives are so big
> now, go with a gig or more of swap even if you have plenty of RAM.
> However, the way I'm seeing it is this: What's the point of having a
> gig of swap if it only gets used during the worst possible time?
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	Jan
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