2GB swap partition limit?

[Horst von Brand]

Russell Coker <russell at coker.com.au> wrote:
> On Friday 17 March 2006 00:35, "Mauro Mozzarelli" <mmkernel at ezplanet.net> 
> wrote:
> > >> > Incidentally such a large swap space will not do you any good in most
> > >> > usage scenarios.
> > >>
> > >> Three words: "suspend to disk".
> >
> > I use it for "tmpfs"

> There are situations where machines can perform very well with a tmpfs
> that is significantly larger than RAM.  There was one time that one of my
> machines with 512M of RAM needed a 6G tmpfs and gave really good
> performance with 6G of swap.

> There are also some applications that have a working set which is far
> smaller than the full allocated memory space and which perform well when
> they are mostly swapped out.

Exactly. Plus disk (even expensive, high-end ones) are /s l o w/. You need
to put enough RAM into the machine for what it needs, in which case you use
swap mostly for whatever load spikes run over that, and you care enough not
to let OOM take over... and that is completely unpredictable, unless you
have a very detailed knowledge of the expected load, so any "swap is X
times RAM" advise is bogus. But then again, disk is cheap, and you have to
tell people /something/...
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica                     Fono: +56 32 654431
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