[PLUG] Swapless swapfile? (Workstation with 1gb RAM)
Derek Loree
derek at infotects.com
Thu Mar 21 19:12:18 UTC 2002
"J.A. Henshaw" wrote:
>
>
> I never could figure out how this logic is justified-
> If I have 12 gigs of RAM, do I need a 12 gig swap file?
> If I have 16 megs of RAM, do I REALLY only need a 16 meg swap??
> Of course this is illogical, particularly obvious when taken
> to extremes as suggested above.
I'll have to agree, it seems like the less RAM you have, the bigger the
swap/RAM ratio should be. Granted that paging to a disk is time consuming, at
least you would be able to run more than one application at a time.
I recommend using a swap partition (placed on the fast part of the drive)
instead of a swap file.
> How about the more RAM you have, the smaller the swap file
> you need?
It also seems that with a large amount of RAM, and (a) fixed swap partition(s)
there is no reason to limit your swap space. The main reason I can see for
setting your initial swap space equal to your RAM is the partition scheme (I
never leave free space on a drive, I paid for the whole thing, I want to be
able to use the whole thing). If the system needs it, there it is, if it
doesn't, no performance lost because the swap exists.
BTW, we have a dual proc PIII with 1Gig of RAM, running apache, mysql,
postgresql, php and some other fun stuff, been up for over 80 days, never
touched the swap file (better than 600Megs are used for cache).
Just another $0.02
Derek Loree
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