Ok, so the swap behavior is:  look for allocated but reuse-able swap
blocks in the full higher/est priority swap partition before starting to
allocate from lower priority swap partition?  swap allocation stays
within the higher priority (but purposely smaller) partitions as long as
it finds a free or a reusable block?


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-----Original Message-----

From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of
Mark Wheeler
Sent: Friday, October 12, 2007 10:25 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: high water mark for swap space used?
> Rob van der Heij said:
> Right. So you make an educated guess for what you think you need, and
> define an additional large VDISK as the next level of swap. You use
> the performance monitor to alert you when that next level of swap gets
> used (which means you overflowed the first one, so that should be made
> larger).
> You also need other metrics from your performance monitor to
> understand when the first swap disk is too large (that's when z/VM
> needs to page-in the VDISK frequently). So the right size of swap disk
> depends both on application requirements and on available resources in
> z/VM. Because a change in VDISK size changes the behavior of the
> application, you can not really predict these things. You need to
> measure and act on that.
>

The predomininant recommendations I've seen say allocate two VDISK swap
areas, one with a "best guess" size, and a 2nd lower-priority, large
swap
area. Since Linux supports up to eight, I define 'em all, starting with
a
small, high-priority VDISK, then doubling each successive disk
thereafter,
which provides a great deal of resiliance in case I underestimate the
requirement, or an unexpected spike occurs. If I start seeing pages on
more
than the first two or three, then I know it's time to increase my
virtual
machine size. On the flip side, if I see that none of the swap volumes
are
used, it may be time to reduce the virtual machine size.

Here's some info from one of my current machines:
# /sbin/swapon -s
Filename                        Type            Size    Used    Priority
/dev/dasds1                     partition       980     980     -1
/dev/dasdt1                     partition       1972    1972    -2
/dev/dasdu1                     partition       3952    3952    -3
/dev/dasdv1                     partition       7920    7920    -4
/dev/dasdw1                     partition       15852   13440   -5
/dev/dasdx1                     partition       31720   10860   -6
/dev/dasdy1                     partition       63456   240     -7
/dev/dasdz1                     partition       126924  0       -8

<snip>


Mark L. Wheeler

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