FLASH disk as swap

[Eric Shubert]

Kurt Granroth wrote:
> On 12/3/09 9:39 AM, der.hans wrote:
>> Having swap be 1.5 times the size of ram is good, double the size of ram
>> is better.
> 
> Those are old-school heuristics from back in the day when 32 MB was a 
> lot of RAM.  I stretch to think of a case where 6-8 GB of swap would 
> come into play at *all*.  That is, if you have a case where the system 
> is using multi-gig amounts of swap, then I can almost guarantee that it 
> is utterly unusable.  One could say that it's there as a 
> "just-in-case"... but I'm having a hard time buying that.  Unusable is 
> unusable.  It would take so incredibly long to recover that any 
> production server would have long been rebooted or managed some other way.
> 
> I think I did 2x RAM up until I had 512MB and then 1x RAM until I got to 
> 1GB.  Then I was .5x at 2GB RAM and finally .25x now ;-)

I tend to agree with this assessment. I would expect performance to be 
abysmal on any system that regularly uses 1G, or even 512M of swap. Of 
course, running slowly for a little while is better than freezing.

-- 
-Eric 'shubes'