A.P. Lawrence

Best of the Newsgroups: splitting linux swap space

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From: Floyd Davidson <floyd@barrow.com>
Subject: Re: Configuration of swap space
Date: 23 Jun 2003 07:50:20 -0800 References: <8mEJa.299$nG.362@rwcrnsc51.ops.asp.att.net> <1k47db.bgp.ln@news.it.uc3m.es>

"Peter T. Breuer" <ptb@oboe.it.uc3m.es> wrote:
>Leonard Evens <len@math.northwestern.edu> wrote:
>> I am about to "upgrade" from RH 7.1 to RH9 by doing a fresh install. I 
>> plan to expand my swap space to accomodate my current ram, which is 1.5 
>> Gb.  Originally I had 500 Mb of ram with 1 Gb of swap, but the vendor I 
>> bought the machine from decided to make two swap partitions of 500 Mb 
>> each.  Or at least that is what I have now.  Following RedHat's 
>> recommendation, I plan to allow for 2 Gb of swap space.   Is there any 
>
>Don't. If you are more than 100MB into swap, you are in trouble. The
>more memory you have, the less swap you need too. So stick at 1GB and
>begrudge them that!

I agree with the above.  If the OP had 500Mb of RAM and did not
need more swap space, changing to 1500Mb of RAM certainly isn't
going to cause a _greater_ need for swap!

>> reason to split this into smaller swap partitions, or should I just make 
>> one large swap partition?
>
>Do as you like. There is no particular advantage either way, but two is
>more flexible.

If multiple partitions are set to have the same priority, they
will be accessed each in turn.  If they are on separate drives
which can be accessed at the same time, that is exactly what
will happen and the speed of swap access will be significantly
increased.  It works exactly the same was as the speed increase
with a RAID array.

If the OP has multiple SCSI drives he can benefit from using
multiple swap partitions.

-- 
Floyd L. Davidson           <http://web.newsguy.com/floyd_davidson>
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)                         floyd@barrow.com

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