Date: Wed, 7 Jun 2000 20:42:42 +0100 (BST) From: Mac <mac@ngo.org.uk> To: webmaster@wmptl.com Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: is swap a neccessity? Message-ID: <200006071942.UAA04047@ngo.org.uk> In-Reply-To: <393E9E14.B6056F2D@wmptl.com> from Nathan Vidican at "Jun 7, 0 03:10:12 pm"
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Nathan Vidican Wrote
> I understand there is some conflict as to the right amount of swapspace;
> I've seen various postings on it here a few times now. Some say too much
> is a bad thing, most say (2 * RAM) = swap; yet others say that doesn't
> apply anymore. Going along with that thought, if more swapspace is
> needed as less RAM is available; could one not do away with swapspace
> all-together if they had more RAM than they ever anticipate needing?
> EG: running 128Megs RAM on a machine that would normally run fine with
> 100meg swap and 20megs ram? or even to a larger extent; running with
> 768megs ram on a machine that would normally have run with 200meg swap
> and 128megs ram?
>
Basically yes. swap is not _mandatory_. A system can run perfectly
well without it (all systems do for the first bits of booting at
least).
However, there's no harm in having some (if you can afford the disk
space). It's great for those unforseen occasions when you need much,
much more RAM than you ever would have predicted.
I run at least two of the machines here with no swap at all. One's the
mail server. It never runs out of real memory, and disk space is rather
tight so I've turned off swap (and given over all the disk to
file-systems).
In summary you don't _need_ it, but have it. If it's not needed it'll not be
used (unless your OS is doing something really silly), and you never know
when it might come in handy.
Mac
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