swap space

Kris Kennaway kris at obsecurity.org
Tue May 3 14:21:06 PDT 2005


On Tue, May 03, 2005 at 03:15:54PM -0600, Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC wrote:
> 
> On May 3, 2005, at 3:07 PM, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> 
> >On Tue, May 03, 2005 at 03:02:11PM -0600, Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net  
> >LLC wrote:
> >
> >>
> >>On May 3, 2005, at 2:45 PM, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> >>
> >>>Since it's a pain to add swap later you want to make
> >>>allowances for future expansion (e.g. you'd need 32GB of swap if you
> >>>ever plan to add 32GB of RAM).
> >>>
> >>
> >>I understand that people recommend as much swap as you have ram or
> >>more.  However, is this required and why?  I have a dual opteron
> >>system running i386 5.3-release (with released patches) and it has
> >>4GB RAM and only 2GB of swap, which is hardly ever touched, and when
> >>it is, just in small amounts.
> >>
> >>Why is this a problem?  (If it ever needs the 2gb of swap I am in
> >>trouble as the load at that time would be sky high and the machine
> >>not really responsive anyway)
> >>
> >
> >I explained in my email..you need it to dump the kernel.
> >
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Well, on my production system, I am not dumping any kernels.  Once It  
> crashes, I reboot it and go back into production.  Anything dumped  
> would get wiped out.  Luckily I am pretty conservative and only move  
> to new versions of the OS when they have been released a while and so  
> my machines have not had panics in years.

It's up to you, of course, but it's been my experience that you might
regret the small expenditure of a few gigabytes one day when you do
run into a panic you need help to solve...

Kris
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