Is swap really needed when RAM's aplenty

James Mckenzie jjmckenzie51 at earthlink.net
Wed Aug 18 15:55:56 UTC 2010


Andras Simon <szajmi at gmail.com> wrote:
>Sent: Aug 18, 2010 4:20 AM
>To: Community support for Fedora users <users at lists.fedoraproject.org>
>Subject: Re: Is swap really needed when RAM's aplenty
>
>On 8/18/10, Sam Varshavchik <mrsam at courier-mta.com> wrote:
>> I'll probably have a new server with 16 gigs of RAM on the way, soon.
>>
>> With this amount of RAM being sufficient, do I really need a swap partition
>> set up? I do understand that a swap partition is needed for hibernation, but
>> this server does not need to hibernate.
>
>I'm not sure what you mean by "need", but Fedora will run without a
>swap partition.
>
It will, that is true, but from my UNIX training, it is always a good idea to have a swap partition, but you don't have to follow the 2x rule.  500MB or maybe even 250MB will do.  Check it with the swap command, and if no space is ever used, then you can remove it and reclaim the space.  Never say "swap is not needed".  I've seen systems with 32 GB of available ram use swap.

James McKenzie



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