Is swap really needed when RAM's aplenty

Mikkel mikkel at infinity-ltd.com
Wed Aug 18 16:32:50 UTC 2010


On 08/18/2010 10:55 AM, James Mckenzie wrote:
> 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
> 
One other reason you might want swap - if you want to be able to
suspend to disk, you need enough swap to hole the current state of
the machine. I would have a swap partition slightly larger then
physical memory if you plan to use that option.

Mikkel
-- 

  Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!

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