swap space

[Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC]

On May 3, 2005, at 3:07 PM, Kris Kennaway wrote:

> On Tue, May 03, 2005 at 03:02:11PM -0600, Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net  
> LLC wrote:
>
>>
>> On May 3, 2005, at 2:45 PM, Kris Kennaway wrote:
>>
>>> Since it's a pain to add swap later you want to make
>>> allowances for future expansion (e.g. you'd need 32GB of swap if you
>>> ever plan to add 32GB of RAM).
>>>
>>
>> I understand that people recommend as much swap as you have ram or
>> more.  However, is this required and why?  I have a dual opteron
>> system running i386 5.3-release (with released patches) and it has
>> 4GB RAM and only 2GB of swap, which is hardly ever touched, and when
>> it is, just in small amounts.
>>
>> Why is this a problem?  (If it ever needs the 2gb of swap I am in
>> trouble as the load at that time would be sky high and the machine
>> not really responsive anyway)
>>
>
> I explained in my email..you need it to dump the kernel.
>

Thanks!

Well, on my production system, I am not dumping any kernels.  Once It  
crashes, I reboot it and go back into production.  Anything dumped  
would get wiped out.  Luckily I am pretty conservative and only move  
to new versions of the OS when they have been released a while and so  
my machines have not had panics in years.

Thanks
Chad