Re: RHEL 4 improvement in use of swap? (compared to RHEL 3)

["robert infotility com" <robert infotility com>]

Hi Leos, thanks a lot for your reply, it's very informative.

> About a year ago we found an issue with RHEL 3 AS, which we considered
> serious - however, when I called Red Hat support, I was assuerd that the
> behaviour was absolutely normal. What happened was a server with 4 CPUs,
> 2 GB RAM and 2 GB swap, which started swapping terribly after some disk
> activity appeared, and kept swapping ever since then, until we rebooted it.

OK, you've got a lot of memory and swap -- this suggests
there is more to solving this problem than just increasing
the system resources ....

> We solved it by turning off the swap - fortunatelly we had enough RAM.
> This way the RAM does not get filled with disk cache and the application
> is not forced to slow down due to swapping and everything works fine.
> When we tried this application on RHEL 4, it worked much better - no
> swapping, even with heavy disk activity.

Can you please clarify one thing? You wrote: "When we tried this
application on RHEL 4, it worked much better" -- was swapping enabled
but not used, or was it disabled?

Thanks again, I appreciate it a lot.

Robert Dodier