Performance sucks when you are swapping. Swap is for when you've exceeded RAM; it is a counter-measure to give you some breathing room until you can get out of that situation.
Swapping is like an emergency airbag. You want swap space to exist, but if you actually use it there's a problem. So, you don't need it in this kind of controlled environment. Can the OS be configured to not have any? Depends on the OS. You might be wasting a few gigabytes of disk... which used to be a lot of $, now it is not. Tom On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 1:18 PM, Shane Milburn <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm doing a project for a $CLIENT who has requested that I build out a small > web farm capable of serving 1M hits an hour average and peak traffic to > 3M/hour. No problem there but when building the systems we got into a debate > about how he wants the OS built. Basically he said DO NOT build a swap > partition or swap file. I asked why and his response was "These are cookie > cutter web servers that do nothing other than serve apache requests. They > have nothing else on them so we'll run apache up to XXX for MaxClients and > MaxSpareServers (just shy of running the box out of memory) and leave it. " > > He's the $CLIENT and I'l build it the way he requests but my questions > are... > > Would/Have you run a web server without swap? (they have 500Gb drives in > them so there's room for a swap partition.) > Any benefits or drawbacks to doing this? (in context of a pure webserver > that does nothing else but serve pages as part of the pool it is a member > of.) > > Happy Friday! > > cheers, > -shane > -- > > > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss > This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators > http://lopsa.org/ > > _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
