[replying to both] On Mon, Aug 26, 2002 at 02:58:02AM -0500, Phil Doroff wrote: > Hrm, keep the list updated as to whether you actually hit deep into swap or > not.. > > I'm betting on no. I've never seen a linux system that was using a ton of > swap that wasn't absolutely I/O bound and literally useless for anything. > (like, 40 minute ssh login times and the like). I was actually using 2 gigs worth of swap the other day without any problems, I was generating a *HUGE* pdf file, the system was perfectly usable. (I do believe i showed some of those to you phil =) > > I'm sure however, there are specific instances where huge swap is useful. > Since I almost exclusively use linux in an ISP server role (apache, > sendmail, mysql, etc.) I've not run across any of these in the real world. > > So, we keep swap to 512MB. The reasoning behind it beind that if we're > needing more than 512, the system is allready too screwed to be fixed, and > will just need the reboot anyways. (these are webservers with 512 to 1.5GB > of ram in them) That's appropriate for your system because /just about/ everything that's running that *could* be swapped, shouldn't be. > > -Phil > > > > Um. Dunno where you got 128M + 256Mswap from. I've got 1gig physical plus > > 1.6gig swap. I made it up, the point was that you can't always get the amount of physical ram that you'll need in a system, swap is meant to make up the difference with a little buffer zone for the unexpected spikes. In a perfect world you've always got enough RAM, and don't need swap, in the real world you sometimes need 1G of total memory on a system that only has 256M of ram, which would mean that 256M physical + 512M virtual is not enough. > > -Yaron > > -- Matthew S. Hallacy FUBAR, LART, BOFH Certified http://www.poptix.net GPG public key 0x01938203