Swap Warning Message?

[Ronald Klop]

On Thu, 23 May 2013 14:55:20 +0200, Michael Gass <mgass at csbsju.edu> wrote:

> Updated 9.1 to 9 stable on an old PII with 256 MB of memory.
> (FreeBSD runs fine on this machine).  After updating have
> been getting the following warning on startup:
>
> warning: total configured swap (524288 pages) exceeds maximum recommended
> amount (497056 pages).
> warning: increase kern.maxswzone or reduce amount of swap space.
>
> I allocated 2.0 GB of swap when I installed.  This was not a problem
> in the past.
>
> Should I ignore this warning or do I need to do something?

Do you ever use that amount of swap?
Swap needs some memory for administration of which page goes where so it  
has a cost to increase swap too much.
If you are swapping 2 GB on 256 MB I don't think you have a very usable  
machine, but I don't know the details of what you are doing. Maybe your  
swap is on very fast SSD.

My advice would be to monitor your swap usage and reduce the amount of  
swap to a little more than you really use. Probably 1 or 2 times the  
amount of RAM.

Ronald.