Today I was poking around on a CentOS amd64 machine that keeps randomly crashing. I am not the sysadmin for this machine; he is on vacation. Anyway, I noticed something that seemed unusual to me. This machine has 1 GB of RAM, and a grand total of 8 GB of swap consisting of two 4 GB partitions, each on a separate drive. These two drives also happen to be in a RAID-1 mdadm device.
Does a 4 GB swap partition seem excessively large to anyone? I read the mkswap man page and found the following regarding swap limitations: The maximum useful size of a swap area depends on the architecture and the kernel version. It is roughly 2GiB on i386, PPC, m68k, ARM, 1GiB on sparc, 512MiB on mips, 128GiB on alpha and 3TiB on sparc64. For kernels after 2.3.3 there is no such limitation. The last would seem to imply that since uname tells me "2.6.18-53.1.21.el5", there should be no swap size limitation. Is that correct? Am I barking up the wrong tree here with the swap? Thanks, Stephen /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
