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Typical Swap Size

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BryanY

MIS
Aug 18, 2001
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I'm just curious about how large most people set their swap partitions. I understand that the old '1.5X physical memory' rule is considered out of date. (Sun recommends 30% of physical memory for Solaris) So I was just wondering how you guys typically size it.
 
We're still using 2 x physmem - and this on systems with 256gb of RAM...

Mike

To err is human,
but to really foul things up -
you require a man Mike.

Want to get great answers to your Tek-Tips questions? Have a look at faq219-2884

 
Wow! We just had a huge discussion about this with our DBA's. Once you get beyond a certain about of RAM, you don't need as much swap was the general conclusion although I think it really varies with each system/application.

I would look at how much swap is being used now via "swapinfo" and add swap accordingly. Otherwise, your just wasting device space.
 
disk space is cheap :)

But yes, mariab is quite right.

Mike

To err is human,
but to really foul things up -
you require a man Mike.

Want to get great answers to your Tek-Tips questions? Have a look at faq219-2884

 
Hi

Nowadays, physical memory can configure more than 10GB. I'm agree, 1.5 x real memory consider out of date. imagine, how many disk space we have to use just only to configure swap space.




Regards
Rashid Hamid
 
Hmm, always a good one for discussion, as a general rule I use minimum 1x Memory, pref. 1.5x mem. However, as above there are exceptions if there is a lot of mem installed.

We don't install apps on the root disk, they go vg01 etc...

Systems now come with 72GB internal disks so after the O/s is on there is often plenty of space for a generous amount of swap.

There is also the discussion about secondary swap.

I'm lucky, I work for a very big company so the cost of a extra few GB of disk is not an issue.

I'm sure we are generous in some cases, but we don't get many issues re. swap space.

Interesting one about Sun and 30%, a Sun instructor once told me that a Sun box should have enough mem. so it doesn't swap !!! Hmm, good sales pitch, but the recommendation of 30% seems to confirm that.

Martin
 
Well, I always go with 2x swap.

reasoning
1. If you can afford 10G ram then the 20G for swap is not a problem. If you are running 10G of ram you are most probably running a nice box lets say N Class or better perhaps V I am not sure but like previously said disk is much cheaper than the ram and most systems from HP with that kind of ram are usually shipped with 73g disk or more.

2. DBA's are funny, they require the most memmory from the system and are the ones that say they need the least. Don't listen to them it's your box!
 
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