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#16 Re: Creating dynamic swap space Posted by simonw (84.45.xx.xx) on Mon 1 Oct 2007 at 02:41 I pondered this a while back. I think (but I'm not 100% sure) that it is best to have some swap for most systems, as it can be used to page out allocated memory that is rarely used, clearing physical memory to be used for caching I/O more efficiently, thus allowing a slight performance gain over the same system with no swap at all. The idea is swap has the stuff that should never have been allocated in the first place, or should have been freed. In practice this is rarely more than a few percent of memory, and the gains are marginal, but one might be able to tweak it for more real world gains. I guess for some work loads actively using swap might make sense, but it is pretty rare these days, now memory is cheap. The other factor to consider is where the kernel dump utilities will put the crash dump, some folk opt to put this in swap space, so the size of memory would seem a sensible size for them to make their swap, but there is no need to put it there these days, but if you really want space for such a dump pre-allocated, it is a plausible way to reserve it, without having to keep that much disk space free somewhere "just in case". Time for article on avoiding run away processes causing these issues in the first place?

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