Swap partition

[Martin Pool]

On 14 Feb 2003, James McNeill <james at heague.com.au> wrote:
> Happy Valentine's everyone!
> 
> I've a quick query about swap sizes.
> I'm running a file server, 128mb RAM. What size of swap partition would be
> appropriate?

256 or 512MB?

> Red Hat "Reccomends" about 2x you RAM is best. Is there any reason shouldn't
> have a 2gb swap?

No, you could do this, and you'd have 2176MB of VM to work with.
However, if your working set was much more than 128MB then things
would start to get pretty slow, and it would be well and truly
grinding by the time you used the whole 2GB.  

For contrived cases like allocating a 2GB array and then processing it
with tight locality it might be OK.

Basically it shouldn't hurt but it might not help.  If you're
expecting to add more memory in the future then allocating swap space
now might make sense.

-- 
Martin