2GB swap partition limit?

Russell Coker russell at coker.com.au
Fri Mar 17 11:00:01 UTC 2006


On Friday 17 March 2006 19:19, Callum Lerwick <seg at haxxed.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-03-16 at 11:00 -0700, Lamont R. Peterson wrote:
> > IMHO, the main reason that the common advice is something like "2x RAM"
> > is that those in the know were not willing or able (for whatever
> > reason(s)) to explain the real truth to newbies, and that led to people
> > thinking that it was some magic number.  I've even heard otherwise
> > intelligent, knowledgeable admins tell people that you *absolutely must*
> > make swap 2x RAM or it won't work or "performance will be horrid at
> > best."
>
> Speaking from experience, the 2x RAM rule was quite real for some time.
> 2.4 was very swap happy, and early 2.6 had some rather nasty OOM killer
> bugs...

2.4 only swapped if it needed to.  I used to run some servers on 2.4 which had 
2G of RAM and only used about 20M of swap.  They ran a small number of 
programs (Qmail, and the Courier POP and IMAP servers) which generally had 
short lifetimes for processes and nothing got swapped.

It really depends on what you are doing.  Sometimes you can't even accurately 
determine what you need until you go live in production.

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