> I've heard that too, but it doesn't seem to make much sense > to me. If > you get to the point where your machine is _needing_ 2GB of swap then > something has gone horribly wrong (or you just need more RAM in the > machine) and it will just crawl until the kernel kills off whatever > process causes the swap space to be exceeded. Seems to me that you > should only have that much swap if you can't afford more RAM > or you've > tapped out your machine's capacity, and your application needs that > much memory. > -M@ I've heard the same, the reason behind it was that there needs to be one-to-one copy of the memory to be able to swap out everything and to have a gain in the total "memory", you'd need twice as much swap as memory to have a doubling of your memory.
But afaik this behaviour has been adjusted since the 2.4.5 kernel and isn't a real issue anymore. Please keep in mind that I'm no expert at all on linux, so if you want to be sure, you'd better mail to the kernel-mailinglist orso :) Anyway, I manage a few machines with 1GB++ memory and none of them has more than 1G of swap and none of them uses that swap for more than a few MB unless something was terribly wrong, so the actual 'risk' probably doesn't have a high chance to occur. Arjen ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faqs/FAQ.html