16GB RAM -> Swap?

[Ivan Voras]

Ewald Jenisch wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've got a Blade-system with 16GB RAM, but "only" one 140GB
> harddisk. My question is about swap-space: Traditional knowledge
> recommends swap = 2*RAM. This would mean 32GB swap (!).
> 
> Should I really go for 32GB swap space? Or will e.g. 16GB (= RAM-size)
> be enough? 
> 
> Please note, that I don't do kernel debugging etc. on this machine -
> just a production machine used for network monitoring (Mrtg, nfsen,
> cacti)

The only thing you would probably need swap for on such a machine is to
catch kernel core dumps in case something goes wrong. And if you're
running 7.0, the dumps no longer include entire memory so you'll need
much less space (AFAIK, upto kmem_size will be dumped, and this is
limited to 2 GB right now).

You don't need any swap at all, but I'd still recommend something like 2
GB, just in case.

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