Off Topic I am not a swap fan these days. I am not to sure it's really that necessary. If the system has adequate memory for the applications and task it will be doing. Most times there will be little to no swap used ever. The more memory, the less likely you will ever swap. And if you do it's very small amounts. Any way you look at it swapping is bad. You are substituting one of the slowest components for one of the fastest. Either way swapping kills performance. Sure it could be the difference of out of memory, and apps, machine crashing, halting etc. Rare. Most times it's a hit in performance not needed. Those rules of thumb for swap size vs ram size is only relevant if you have small amounts of ram. A system these days needs a min of 512, either physical or combo, swap and physical. Once you top 512MB of physical memory. Your needs for swap start diminishing. 1GB or more of ram, and hardly the need for any swap. At that point I tend to use 256-512Mb just to be safe. However I have seen years go by on some servers, with little to no swapping. So I max out on most machines at 256MB swap these days. IMHO swapping is bad. If you are swapping more than a 10-20MBs, more than likely you are best off to get some more ram. Unless that's not an option then maybe another machine. When you do swap, things slow down, so I just seen no reason in it. Granted it was needed for the low mem systems of yester year. These days you can get a 512MB-1GB stick of ram for $50 or so. Hardly relevant any more. I have been toying around with getting rid of swap all together in some of my machines. When I experimented on a core NAS server. Only times I would have issues, was every now and then during heavy Gentoo updated/compiling. But not always, and never show stoppers. But the jury is still out for no swap here. -- Sincerely, William L. Thomson Jr. Obsidian-Studios, Inc. http://www.obsidian-studios.com _______________________________________________ LARTC mailing list LARTC@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://mailman.ds9a.nl/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lartc
