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Re: [LUG] adding a 2nd swap partition

 

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PAUL SUTTON wrote:
>
> Should I have a bigger swap file or does the rule on swap file size v
> ram size depend on usage?

There is no rule on swap file size v ram size any more.

All that matters is you don't run out of memory, because unpleasant
things can happen to your processes when that happens. Well usually some
of the processes just fail with "out of memory" errors, but sometimes it
gets a lot messier, especially on servers you expect to be running 24x7
when losing a few stray processes (almost at random) is not good karma.

There are some good arguments for having some swap space, so that really
stale pages can be paged out to make room for more disk cache and the
like. But at work where we have a box that has more than sufficient
memory it never touches it's swap space anyway, so these arguments may
not apply depending on the virtual memory algorithm in your kernel.

Of course if memory was as cheap in 1960 as it is now, we'd probably
never have invented virtual memory.
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