Re: Size of Swap with large phy. mem

On Thu, 25 Jan 2001, Timothy brown wrote:

> We are getting a few new machines and will be putting a large db on them.
> I normally allocate
> Swap space = 2 * Phys. Mem
> Even for machines with 4G of physical memory (is this wrong?)

It depends; it's an old school of thought that is not necessary with Solaris (Solaris can run without any swap given enough RAM). The flip side is that sometimes 2 * physmem isn't enough. I've configured a mail server for an ISP client, which had 256 MB of RAM, but has 4 GB of swap to cope with the occassional very peak demand.

Quite simply, swap should be sized to your application's needs.

> Anyway the new machines are going to be E6500's with 30G of memory, now
> should I allocate a 60G for swap? (my god thats a lot!)

If you don't need it, 60 GB of swap is a lot!

> Does anybody have any experience, suggestions?

It might be worth talking to your DB vendor (Oracle?) and/or Sun for some advice in this area.

HTH,

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Rich Teer

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