RE: Swap - suggestions needed

[Rik van Riel <riel redhat com>]

On Mon, 5 Jul 2004, Marc Brown wrote:

> RHEL3 doc on swap - 
> https://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-3-Manual/sysadmin-guide/ch-swapspace.html
>  says swap chunk should not be more than 2GB .
> 
> Is the doc not uptodate ? or shouldnt we use more than
> 2GB ?

Ahhh, the document recommends to have no more than 2GB swap in
total, which is probably enough for almost all workloads...

This has to do with the speed of hard disks, not with the size
of RAM.  If your 128MB system is 256MB into swap, it's not a
very big issue since hard disks are fast and can read any data
from swap quickly.

However, if your 16GB system were 32GB into swap, it'd take
ages for the hard disk to read all the data from swap and your
workload would be getting nowhere...

For typical workloads, you don't need more than 2GB of swap,
no matter how much memory you have in the system.

-- 
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan