Re: 3.0 wishlist Was: Overview of 2.2.x goals?

Chris Adams (cadams@ro.com)
20 Jan 1998 16:15:46 GMT

According to Dan Hollis <goemon@sasami.anime.net>:
>On Tue, 20 Jan 1998, linux kernel account wrote:
>> On Mon, 19 Jan 1998, Dan Hollis wrote:
>> > The reserved section is called your swap partition.
>> Which then must be as big as ram..
>And which generally is. At least, I'm pretty sure most people arent
>running less swap than physical ram. Isnt the general rule of thumb these
>days that swap should be at least 2x ram?

I don't have my swap as big as RAM on my news server, for example. It
has 320MB RAM, but only 128MB swap. Why would I want 640MB of swap? If
the system EVER gets deep into swap, I'm screwed anyway because if I am
having to do disk accesses for RAM, I'll never keep up with a fairly
full newsfeed. The only things in swap right now are little used system
programs like mingetty, klogd, part of sendmail and crond, etc. (the
system is using 1160K of swap right now and has been up for 45 days).
The only reason that anything is in swap is that a couple of weeks ago I
was compiling a new version of INN while expire was running (expire
takes gobs of RAM).

Looking around at the rest of our servers, we don't have as much swap as
RAM on several of them. Again, mainly because if we got 100-200MB into
swap, performance would be completely trashed anyway. We use swap more
as an indicator of "time to buy more RAM".

-- 
Chris Adams - cadams@ro.com
System Administrator - Renaissance Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.