RE: Swap space requirements on 10g installs - must it really equal RAM?

From: Goulet, Dick <DGoulet_at_vicr.com>
Date: Tue, 4 Oct 2005 16:54:00 -0400
Message-ID: <4001DEAF7DF9BD498B58B45051FBEA6502D43E48@25exch1.vicorpower.vicr.com>

Jay,

        I use HP-UX or RedHat vs Solaris & we set swap to 2 times ram. The reason is that swap gets used to hold an image of the operating process for diagnostic purposes in the event of a system crash. If we had less than ram for swap we could not start enough processes to use all of ram.

-----Original Message-----

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of JayMiller_at_TDWaterhouse.com
Sent: Tuesday, October 04, 2005 3:00 PM
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Swap space requirements on 10g installs - must it really equal RAM? Hello,

When installing 10G on dev and QA I had gotten the error that we should configure swap space to equal RAM. Since I figured out 4G of swap space was
more than enough (why would we need 16G of swap space?) I ignored it, installed the software, created the database, and had no problems.

But one of the other DBAs was doing the production install and when he saw
the message he balked and opened a TAR with Oracle. The Oracle support tech
said that you *should* have swap set = to RAM. To be precise they said:

"...the database should not be installed on a machine having less than a 1:1
ratio of RAM to swap.

I would not advise skipping this message."

Speaking with one of the SAs he said the system won't even recognize more
than 4G of swap.

Does anyone know of any reason why we would need more than 4G of RAM or (preferably :) why this isn't really important. Documentation for the latter would also be nice as I would now have to convince my management that
this isn't necessary even though Oracle said it was.

Oracle 10.2
Solaris 2.9
16G RAM
4G Swap

Thanks,
Jay Miller
Sr. Oracle DBA

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http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l Received on Tue Oct 04 2005 - 15:57:16 CDT