[CS-FSLUG] Trivial questions

[john-thomas richards]

On Tue, May 25, 2004 at 08:18:31AM -0500, Stephen J. McCracken wrote:
> > > 2. If I have a RAM of size X with a swapfile of size Y, and I suddenly 
> > > upgrade the RAM to 2X, should I increase the swapfile size? how much? 
> > > how can I do it if it is necessary?
> > 
> > the general rule of thumb is to have a swap file at least twice the size
> > of physical ram.
> > 
> It really depends on the use of the machine.  In a desktop/workstation
> you might want 2x ram, but on a server this shouldn't be necessary.  In
> a server you don't want much stuff being swapped out to disk and if you
> find that you are using much swap at all, it is better to get more RAM. 
> So, on a server it shouldn't matter much as you shouldn't be using the
> swap anyway.

i agree that swapping to disk is not good server practice, but what
happens when a mission-critical has a memory leak that leaks rapidly and
uses up all the physical ram?  with a disk swap performance would
clearly suffer, but the machine would continue to *run*.  most linux
servers are x86 and therefore limited in the physical ram they can have
so adding far too much ram is often not feasible.
-- 
john-thomas
------
A failure is a man who has blundered but is not able to cash in on the
experience.
Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)