[luau] do 2gb ram need swap space?

Warren Togami warren at togami.com
Fri May 24 17:42:01 PDT 2002


On Fri, 2002-05-24 at 16:32, MonMotha wrote:
> Under the older VMs you were supposed to always have SOME swap, though 
> I'm not sure if this is needed anymore under the newer 2.4 VMs (unless 
> of course RH is still using the old POS 2.4.9 kernel with Rik's old VM).
> 
> The double your RAM figure is totally off base though.  I'd probably put 
> in maybe 128 or 256MB of swap just to have some (the kernel will page 
> out stuff that has been idle for a really long time in order to free up 
> more RAM for a disk cache, which can improve performance), but 2x 2GB 
> RAM is totally wrong.  The RH guys need to be shot (once again) for 
> putting such a blind reccomendation in their setup prog.
> 
> --MonMotha

Red Hat does indeed still use Rik van Riel's VM, but it is highly
optimized and fixed with many patches that Linus has been ignoring
(leading to Andrea rewriting the entire thing because they thought Rik's
VM was crappy).  Red Hat's latest production kernel also uses Rik's
reverse RMAP patch that improves performance, and they also have kernel
preemption IIRC.  Unfortunately, something else about their kernel makes
it incredibly slow at the moment... I'm trying to figure out exactly
what.

Here's Chris Kloiber of Red Hat Enterprise Support's answer to Scott's
question.  I think highly of Chris so I personally would follow his
advice.


> I would say that for your personal machine 2GB swap is enough with 2GB
> RAM. (you will likely never use it) However if the machine is a
> production machine of any sort, stick with the recommended 2-3x RAM
> swap.
> 
> -- 
> **********************************************************************
> Chris Kloiber, RHCE                                  Red Hat,Inc.
> Hardware Certification            aka                1801 Varsity Dr.
> Enterprise Support             "WireHead"            Raleigh, NC 27606
> **********************************************************************
> 




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