On 22/02/07, Howard Lowndes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
It's recommended that your swap space should be 2x your RAM. In your case it's .2x
Blanket statement != useful. On a desktop, where I'm putting OOo in the background and letting firefox chew all my ram for a while - yes, I'll take lots of swap. On a high-performance server - I'll spend the extra couple of hundred and get 2x the RAM instead, I don't want the performance hit that swapping implies. I'll probably add some swap in as a bit of a buffer for pathological cases, but if that swap starts being used I'll be worried. Well, I might be, anyway - it would depend on the exact purpose of the machine and its usage patterns. On my N800, where 'swap' means extraneous writes to flash, I'll pass on swap. My point is, swap is not always a good thing, and 2x is not always the right amount. It used to be a decent guideline, for desktop systems, when ram was expensive and most machines had maybe 128mb of ram. These days, when your average desktop comes with 1Gb, and the upgrade to 2Gb is perhaps $150 more at most... well, maybe swap is not so neccessary In this case, Peter hasn't given us enough information - we don't know if he's working with a low-end server, a desktop, a laptop. He's *probably* not working with an embedded device... We don't know what he's doing with the server, and we don't know what it's running. We really don't know if "2xram" is an appropriate amount of swap.
Peter Hardy wrote: > I'm a little puzzled by this: > > total used free shared buffers cached > Mem: 5005084 4816352 188732 0 156644 3165540 > -/+ buffers/cache: 1494168 3510916 > Swap: 1052616 1052616 0 > > Is this sort of usage normal? Filling a gigabyte of swap space while > just under 1.5GB of memory is going towards buffers seems odd to me. And > vmstat reports no usage of this swap space over a 15 minute period. > > What sort of utilities are around to analyse swap space? I'd like to get > an idea of exactly what's using all of that memory. > -- Howard. LANNet Computing Associates - Your Linux people <http://lannetlinux.com> When you want a computer system that works, just choose Linux; When you want a computer system that works, just, choose Microsoft. -- Flatter government, not fatter government; abolish the Australian states. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
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