Re: Swap space settings and other partitioning q's
From: Morningdew (yahooaddyismorning42dew_at_spam.free)
Date: 02/09/05
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Date: Wed, 09 Feb 2005 05:44:11 -0600
Morningdew wrote:
>> I was just curious to know... What are some good rules of thumb for
>> configuring swap space under Linux? For that matter, are there any
J.O. Aho wrote:
> Size for swap usually have been given as 1.5 to 2.5 times the size of
> ram, everything depending on whom you are talking with and what distro
> you use. I have settled for around 2 times the ram size, not that I ever
> have had more use than a few MB of the 4GB swap.
Wow, that's completely contradictory to what Paul Sherwin replied with,
which is...
> 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.
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> You can always add a swap file later, which will keep you going until
> you upgrade memory.
>
But I *am* maxing out so I will definitely run some swap and play it
safe. I am going from 90Gb to 340Gb storage, so I can afford some swap
"just in case". To turn Paul's argument around, I can always cut back
on swap space later.
J.O. Aho wrote:
> One swap is enough, even if you run 32-bit and 64-bit linux, but if you
> have heavy usage of swap, then splitting up to more than harddrive can
> speed the swap speed.
Well I'll just play it by ear and see what happens then.
Morningdew wrote:
>> One consideration, besides size, is location. This question goes beyond
>> swap space, too. How does Linux like to have it's partitions metered
>> across multiple drives? Should the root and swap be on different
>> physical drives or does it matter? If it is better to separate, which
>> would benefit most from "the faster drive"? Does it actually help to
>> split the swap amongst partitions on differing drives, similar to (yes,
>> remotely similar to) how striping speeds up RAID performance?
J.O. Aho wrote:
> Today with the hughe RAM, swap is quite rarely used, so you can put it
> on slower harddrives or use the end part of the harddrive. I have always
> set my swap as the last slice on my harddrives (usually only one
> harddrive with swap).
> Stripping would speed up swap, but you don't need to setup it as raid,
> IBM had a quite good article about swap on linux, but sadly I can't find
> the right link at the moment.
I'll do some googling for it. I am interested in what they'd have to
say for "cranium enhancing" purposes (me like learn stuff).
Morningdew wrote:
>> While I am asking, I would also be interested in suggestions with regard
>> to partitions and placements. I have been running 5Gb roots that include
>> my /var and /home. Most of my "media", including music, video, photos,
>> and the like I have been keeping on a separate partition that I mount
>> under /mnt/share. This way I have access to it from whichever root I
>> boot to, as well as making it publicly readable to my family's logins.
>> Not much needs to be kept private, and, well, I manage that when need be.
J.O. Aho wrote:
> I have done differently, I have a fileserver where I have setup a LVM,
> this one is up on 360GB at the moment (max out at 2TB), the LVM is my
> /home and I share it with NFS to all my computers, so login in you will
> access all your files and settings, regadles on which computer you
> happen to work at.
> I have only removeble medias mounted in /mnt (cdrw/dvdrw/zip/mp3/floppy).
>
> Otherwise I have /usr, /usr/src, /tmp and / as own slices, on machine
> with the mailserver I have /var/spool/mail too as it's own (don't want
> big mails to fill /var and that way block the system).
Thats all cool. I'm not running a home net right now, though I have in
the past. I suppose really much of these decisions depend on how you
intend to use the system. Think for me it is desktop, mostly one user,
with occasional family or guest logins under their own accounts. I will
be connecting up another computer though in maybe a month, when they get
the money together for their final parts to complete the box. I will
share my media and internet connection then. Likely they'll want to run
Windows, so I'll set up myself as an SMB server as I did with my
brothers (who run Win2k desktops). Mainly I ask these partitioning
questions because I want to avoid any hurdles ahead of time, and be
smart about it before I lay it down. Yeah, there are tools to shrink
and expand partitions, and I can copy stuff around a lot with my extra
space (for the time being). But I hope to avoid the later hassles with
good planning up front.
I assume that LVM is Logical Volume Manager or maybe Linux Volume
Management, something like that? I don't know what that is, but I will
look it up.
Morningdew wrote:
>> I think it would be unwise for me to make the /home directories be the
>> same between the two installs (32 and 64-bit). But I am intruiged to
>> know how far such a notion could be taken. Being able to have
>> Thunderbird and my GPG keys available no matter which I boot to would be
>> rather convenient. I could spend more time in 64-bit land. Right now I
>> must use the 32-bit install for that.
J.O. Aho wrote:
> Why would that be the case? The settings would still be the same for the
> applications, regadles if they are compiled as 32 or 64 bit, just waist
> of space to have more than one /home.
Okay well here is a place where I get concerned, and don't want to mess
things up. I mean, lots of configuration information for my user goes
here, and I don't want to cause confusion for my programs. I guess I am
worrying too much. For the most part I will be trying to keep my app
installs between the two in sync. However, if I do have some
differences between them this is where they'd likely collide, no?
But hey, the real goal is to run as much in 64-bit land as possible.
It's just that a few things (proprietary binaries only released on
32-bit) are holding me back. Once I understand how to "mix" the
environment up, I will abandon a straight 32-bit set-up. That is why I
wrote the following.
Morningdew wrote:
>> Lastly, since I don't want to tap you all toooo much all at once, I am
>> curious about this whole "chroot" thing. Since I have both 32 and
>> 64-bit installs, is there a way to make my 32-bit root BE the chroot
>> under 64-bit? That would totally rock! I have zero experience with this
>> and am only sort-of understanding how it all works. I would like to,
>> for instance, just run 64-bit firefox and have it use 32-bit
>> libflashplayer.so. That, of course, being one of the very few things
>> keeping me on the 32-bit side 90% of the time when I would much rather
>> go 64-bit as much as possible.
J.O. Aho wrote:
> I think you may have confused what chroot is, you use it to lock
> software to run in a controlled environment.
Actually I do understand that chroot is mainly used to create secure
"jails" But it is being creatively used by 64-bit Linuxers to run
32-bit stuff "in the chroot".
Morningdew wrote:
>> But I have heard that you can't have a
>> 64-bit app call a 32-bit library. Okay. So then 32-bit FF. But then
>> that also means all the dependencies for FF and for FlashPlayer, right?
>> Well, then, at what point DO the 64 and 32-bit parts commingle? Would
>> 32-bit FF run on the 64-bit X session?
J.O. Aho wrote:
> People are running neverwinter nights on 64bits systems, so there
> shouldn't be problems, you may need a compat library to allow run 32bit
> stuff in 64bits environment, I'm not that much into that as I only have
> 32bits machines.
Well yes, but how are they going about it? Is chroot involved? I guess
I will leave the chroot questions open for someone with AMD64 mixed
64/32-bit environment experience to comment on. Thanks, though, //Aho,
for your feedback. I'll study up on LVM and do some more research on my
own about partitioning. The 32bit-on-64bit stuff is still a bit
perplexing. But if I could grasp win32 library "thunking layers" on NT
for 9x compatibility and virtual dos machines, etc., I am sure I can
eventually grasp this.
Peace,
Morningdew
- Next message: J.O. Aho: "Re: Swap space settings and other partitioning q's"
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- In reply to: J.O. Aho: "Re: Swap space settings and other partitioning q's"
- Next in thread: J.O. Aho: "Re: Swap space settings and other partitioning q's"
- Reply: J.O. Aho: "Re: Swap space settings and other partitioning q's"
- Reply: Paul Sherwin: "Re: Swap space settings and other partitioning q's"
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