On Fri, 11 Sep 2009, [email protected] wrote: > I like the airbag analogy posted earlier...you never, ever want to use swap > space...but it's better than the alternative. Any use of swap is a signal to > buy more RAM or find out the underlying problem. Not having the swap in the > first place almost certainly means that a medium-sized problem becomes a > really > big problem.
I don't like that analogy at all, actually. There are enough ways for kernels to lockup that you just need OOB ability to reboot the server if it gets into a bad state. If it isn't swap it'll be file descriptors or processes or a kernel that just loses its mind and needs a reboot. The better reason was given in this thread which is that the VM in some linux kernels can perform better if it has some swap to work with. The VM is probably tuned best to having a bit of swap at least and having a bit of swap is generally considered best practice and that is the configuration that all the linux kernel VM maintainers likely use -- people running swapless are the minority. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
