Linked by David Adams on Thu 20th Nov 2008 04:19 UTC
Linux and other Unix-like operating systems use the term "swap" to describe both the act of moving memory pages between RAM and disk. It is common to use a whole partition of a hard disk for swapping. However, with the 2.6 Linux kernel, swap files are just as fast as swap partitions. Now, many admins (both Windows and Linux/UNIX) follow an old rule of thumb that your swap partition should be twice the size of your main system RAM. Let us say Iâve 32GB RAM, should I set swap space to 64 GB? Is 64 GB of swap space really required? How big should your Linux / UNIX swap space be?
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Member since:
2005-07-22
But in general ever since 'lazy swap' has been used then the 2X RAM for swap has not been needed.
If however you are running a big Database (eg Oracle ) and it is configured to have a huge SGA then I'd veer towards the 2X RAM for swap just so there is space for all the other processes to swap in and out.
Add that to the falling cost of Hard Drives, isn't is more of a case of
2X RAM for Swap? Yeah. That shiny new 1TB HDD has plenty of space on it. Lets make it 4X RAM for swap. We can afford the disk space.
It is more like a question that is no longer relevant in the Linux world.
Now, if this were windows then that would be a different question due to the different swaping/pagefile allocation models used.