Re: How do I determine appropriate swapspace settings? And other partitioning questions.
From: Morningdew (yahooaddyismorning42dew_at_spam.free)
Date: 02/08/05
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Date: Tue, 08 Feb 2005 15:32:58 -0600
Paul Sherwin wrote:
> There is *no* direct relationship between physical memory and swapfile
> size. These rules of thumb originated in the 70s when people had to
> commission systems before knowing what the application mix would be.
Okay. I would think that the books and distros installers would mention
that it is largely not need after a certain point.
> The idea was that a system with a lot of memory would be used for
> memory intensive applications, so should have a lot of swapspace as
> well. Some systems also used swapspace to hold a memory dump in the
> event of a system crash, so the swap had to be at least as large as
> physical memory.
Well I am not going to be debugging a core dump like that anyway =)
> Modern Linux systems with lots of physical memory will almost never
> swap, unless you're doing something very unusual. If you find the
> system is swapping a lot, you should add more physical memory rather
> than fiddling around with swapspace, My main Linux server is currently
> using 778k of swapspace, and this is quite typical. Despite this,
> people keep configuring gigabytes of swapspace.
Yes, here I am with just shy of a gig. But I should not that besides
the new hard disk coming soon, I *have* been having problems with
memory, even at a Gig. Yeah, I know it seem ridiculous. Even with what
I would figure to be a "light" load running under Gnome I am sitting at
89% memory use, of which 53% is cache. Now 53% of the 89% or 53 _of_
the 89% is ambiguous in gnome-system-monitor. But, still... What is
that Cache? HDD cache? Why does that accumulate rather than flush? If
I have a power outage with that much cache sitting in RAM won't I be
likely to foul up a partition? I guess that'll put the journals to the
test. But dang, I am just sitting here typing and it won't go down.
See, at least three times now I have had my system schitzotically freeze
up on me when that memory ticker hit 100%. It starts to "stutter", then
gets to where I get a half-second of life between 30-second to several
minute seizures. Even at a console, outside of X. Firefox with lots of
tabs was part to blame once. Totem running a downloaded SWF another
time. Come to find out that on my 32-bit install, I didn't have either
swap partition in the /etc/fstab file. I fixed that but have not maxed
out to reproduce the problem yet. I'm sure I'll get to test with the
swap space soon, though.
> You can always add a swap file later, which will keep you going until
> you upgrade memory.
Too broke to joke, so more memory is not happening real soon. Why does
my Linux barf and sputter when physical memory gets full? You would
think it would have some more graceful contingencies. Perhaps my disk
cache (assuming that's what the "cache" portion is) is not configured
properly and needs adjusting. Ugh. Thanks for the reply, though.
> HTH, Paul
> --
> Paul Sherwin Consulting http://paulsherwin.co.uk
Oh, and I, like, re-posted this message a few times because it was not
showing up for me. I tried cutting down some of the cross-posts, and
finally cut back the subject line and got it to post. Heh... of course
it seems you got at least one of them on your nntp server that mine
didn't want to show, 'cuz you replied and I don't see the original. Way
to go Charter Communications. Your NNTP service is not only slow, it
also bites.
Peace,
Morningdew
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