[TriLUG] SWAP size vs physical RAM size

John Broome jbroome at gmail.com
Tue Aug 7 14:00:17 EDT 2007


On 8/7/07, Brian Henning <Brian.Henning at datadirect.com> wrote:
> Hi Gang,
>
> I built a server some time ago.  When I built it, it had 2GB physical
> RAM, so I created a swap partition 4GB in size (somewhere along the way
> I picked up swap = 2x physical as a rule of thumb).  I'm about to
> upgrade the RAM to at least 4GB; possibly 6 or 10 GB (depending on the
> capabilities of the motherboard).  It's not a simple matter at this
> point to create a 8 - 20 GB swap partition (until other hardware
> upgrades are made), so my question is, how crucial is it to have a swap
> file a lot larger than the physical ram space?  Out of the current 4GB
> swap, with 2GB ram, only 73.4 MB of swap is actually in use (according
> to top).  With that kind of current usage metric, am I likely to see a
> lot of problems if I up the physical ram without upping the swap file
> for now?
>
> Primary use of this box is a VMWare host.  Later hw upgrades hopefully
> include an external SCSI drive array to allow one physical HD per VM, or
> at most two VMs per physical HD.  At that point, conceivably an entire
> drive could be dedicated to swap space if necessary.


If you burn through 10 GB ram, and 4gb swap space, you've got other
problems going on. :)

-- 
There are three R's to windows tech support: "Restart, Reboot, Reinstall"



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