swap space

[Kris Kennaway]

On Tue, May 03, 2005 at 08:32:54PM +0200, Chris Knipe wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Simple question really... Can you ever have to much swap space?
> 
> We're sitting with quite a nifty P4 System with 1GB Ram.  We will more than 
> likely add another 2 or 3GB in the month to come as our applications 
> (mainly perl) are consuming vast amounts of memory and swap.
> 
> We made the mistake however of just allocating 512MB swap as we did not 
> know accurately at the time of installation what the resouce requires are 
> going to be (especially not that it would be this high).
> 
> Obviously reinstalling the entire OS / Applications is not really a option. 
> We may want to install a dedicated 40GB just for swap... Would this be 
> advisable, or will it actually slow the system down?  And to what extend?

You can't use more than 32GB in a single device on i386.  It shouldn't
cause problems, but unless you have the expectation of making use of
it, it is wasted space.  One use is that having more swap than RAM is
necessary if you ever run into a kernel panic, so that you'll be able
to dump the image of the system for developers to try to diagnose the
problem.  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).

Kris
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