[ale] that same darn NFS problem SOLVED

[Michael D. Hirsch]

On Monday 17 February 2003 04:21 pm, Jonathan Rickman wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Feb 2003, Michael D. Hirsch wrote:
> > On Monday 17 February 2003 03:20 pm, Jonathan Rickman wrote:
> > > On Mon, 17 Feb 2003, Michael D. Hirsch wrote:
> > > > So the answer is "No, you don't need to increase your swap, but
> > > > doing so may make your system a little more robust under adverse
> > > > conditions".  As Jim Kinney said, disk space is cheap, so why not?
> > >
> > > The real question is, if you're gonna give that much space to swap,
> > > why just one partition?
> >
> > Because I only have one hard disk?  the suggestions below assume that
> > you have multiple drives.
>
> Exactly. We need to make a distinction between systems that are likely
> to make use of this huge swap space and those systems that can never
> reasonably be expected to use it. A laptop with 1GB of RAM probably
> doesn't really need 2GB of swap. Think about it. If it has 2GB of swap,
> it's because the installer followed the 2 to 1 rule blindly. A system
> that has a real need for more than 1GB of swap, probably also has a need
> for more than one physical disk, wouldn't you think?

Depends on what it is there for.  If you expect to use all that swap, yes, 
get a fast disk array for it.  If it is just there in case, then no, you 
don't need the space.

Last week I had a system run out of swap on a 2 gig swap partition.  This 
system shouldn't need any swap under normal circumstances, but it also 
shouldn't go down.  something went wrong with syslog and in about a week 
it filled up swap.  If we hadn't had the full 2 gig, soy only a couple of 
meg, it would have filled up so fast we might not have had a chance to 
recover without just unplugging it.

So it is an example where a huge swap partition was good, but having it be 
fast was not really needed.

Michael

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