swap space

[Charles Swiger]

On May 3, 2005, at 5:02 PM, 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.

It's not required, but the system can't write a panic crash dump out 
unless there is slightly more swap space available than RAM in the box. 
  If your system doesn't crash, and your workload fits into RAM, having 
gigabytes of swap space set up is not very useful....

-- 
-Chuck