on 10-28-2008 3:25 AM William L. Maltby spake the following:
On Tue, 2008-10-28 at 00:21 -0700, John R Pierce wrote:
Ian Masters wrote:
which show your swap partition, whereas on my problem system, 'swapon -s' produces no output at all.
ok, that confirms your supposition, you have no swap configured.
Although I disagree, some on this list have proclaimed that a "properly configured" (for the intended use I guess) system needs no swap.
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A properly configured system "can" need no swap for day to day operations, but you only need *one* runaway process to max out the memory and bring the system to a crashing halt. A little swap is just like a cheap insurance policy. You hope you don't need it, but if you do, you are glad it was there.
Even though the recommended swap is 2 times system memory, I have never made a swap partition over 2 GB. Maybe I am also flirting with disaster, but haven't been bit yet in years. Usually a run away process that hits into swap gives enough time for the kernel to kill it off before the whole system dumps.