From: "Arjen van der Meijden" <acm@tweakers.net>
To: "'Matthew Hixson'" <hixson@poindextrose.org>,
	<pgsql-performance@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: Memory question
Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2003 22:55:40 +0200
Message-ID: <004b01c33cee$7e6b2560$3ac15e91@acm>
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> I've heard that too, but it doesn't seem to make much sense 
> to me.  If 
> you get to the point where your machine is _needing_ 2GB of swap then 
> something has gone horribly wrong (or you just need more RAM in the 
> machine) and it will just crawl until the kernel kills off whatever 
> process causes the swap space to be exceeded.  Seems to me that you 
> should only have that much swap if you can't afford more RAM 
> or you've 
> tapped out your machine's capacity, and your application needs that 
> much memory.
>    -M@
I've heard the same, the reason behind it was that there needs to be
one-to-one copy of the memory to be able to swap out everything and to
have a gain in the total "memory", you'd need twice as much swap as
memory to have a doubling of your memory.

But afaik this behaviour has been adjusted since the 2.4.5 kernel and
isn't a real issue anymore.

Please keep in mind that I'm no expert at all on linux, so if you want
to be sure, you'd better mail to the kernel-mailinglist orso :)

Anyway, I manage a few machines with 1GB++ memory and none of them has
more than 1G of swap and none of them uses that swap for more than a few
MB unless something was terribly wrong, so the actual 'risk' probably
doesn't have a high chance to occur.

Arjen