Quoting Peter Jay Salzman ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): > 1. Having multiple swaps per disk is of almost no benefit at all.
So, a client of mine builds Linux servers, and provides a custom RHEL 3.0 build image for one particular customer that buys a lot of 4 GB RAM dual Opteron systems with dual 73GB SCSI drives. Customer management, for reasons that passeth understanding, insisted they wanted 32GB of swap space on each node, and moreover wanted all of it in a single partition on the boot drive. Such systems were duly delivered, but customer soon reported that the systems were hanging hard while in production use. Extensive tests followed using the Cerberus Test Control Suite (CTCS), which stress-tests Linux boxes using a number of simultaneous software processes including iterative kernel compiles. With a single 32GB swap partition, CTCS induced a system hang in 1 day. With a pair of 16GB swap partitions, CTCS hung the box in 2 days. With four 8 GB swap partitions, five days. And thus up to the ideal configuration, using as many 2 GB swap partitions as the limits on SCSI device numbers permitted, in which, as far as we could tell, CTCS ran forever. The customer's load image was duly modified, and the cause has been presumptively attributed to hitting a bug in the RHEL 3.0 kernel's VM code. (Yes, there was indeed no rational reason why customer needed to deploy all that swap in the first place. But that's not the point I was making.) _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
