Re: how much swap for 10g on a 4Gb RAM system?

On Jul 29, 6:34 am, pellicleund..._at_hotmail.com (obakesan) wrote:
> Hi
>
> I'm just going through installing 10g and wondered about the swap
> requirements. The documents I'm reading suggest:
>
> " Swap space should be twice the amount of RAM for systems with 2GB of
> RAM or less and between one and two times the amount of RAM for systems with
> more than 2GB. "
>
> Since I've got 4 Gig, do I really need 4Gig of Swap? I'm not pressing this
> system as its just a "learning" platform.
>
> Has anyone got any experience with trying this with less:
>
> $ grep -i swaptotal /proc/meminfo
> SwapTotal:     2031608 kB
>
> Thanks
>
> See Ya
> (when bandwidth gets better ;-)
>
> Chris Eastwood
> Photographer, Programmer Motorcyclist and dingbat
> blog:http://cjeastwd.blogspot.com/
>
> please remove undies for reply

The answer is really platform and OS version dependent, as well as dependent on what is going on with the system. In the olden days on most unix, one needed to have the swap predefined for all running processes. Nowadays, there are a number of ways to get around that. Linux allows you to have both a swap partition and a swap file, the former tends to be faster and the latter more flexible and roomy. See http://www.linux.com/feature/121916 for a good intro, note that the kernel version makes a difference. Also see http://forums.oracle.com/forums/message.jspa?messageID=2556276 and the metalink note: 233753.1 it references. And http://kerneltrap.org/node/3000 "BloatyApp may be Oracle with a huge cache of its own, for which swapping out may be a huge mistake."

jg

--
@home.com is bogus.
http://www.thelastlecture.com/