... >> Then why not have a really big swap file? If swap is useful as a >> second layer of caching behind RAM, why doesn't everyone with some >> extra hard drive space have a 100GB swap file? > > I have 12GB of RAM and 12GB of swap on my main PC. Why? Because... why > not? :) After 5 days uptime, it actually has 89M of swap used for some > reason. It has over 10GB cached. All of my sysctl vm.* settings have > been left to the defaults. So I guess it just pushed some unused stuff > out to swap to make room for more caching.
That's what I'm curious about. If some swap is good, why isn't more better? Paul has demonstrated that a Linux system will put at least 10GB to use and probably much more given the opportunity. Disk space is so cheap, why isn't everyone running a 10GB or 100GB swap since Linux will actually put it to use? - Grant
