On Sun, 2015-02-15 at 17:37 -0800, Keith Keller wrote: > On 2015-02-15, Gregory P. Ennis <PoMec at PoMec.Net> wrote: > > > > I am putting together a new mail server for our firm using a SuperMicro > > with Centos 7.0. When performed the install of the os, I put 16 gigs of > > memory in the wrong slots on the mother board which caused the > > SuperMicro to recognize 8 gigs instead of 16 gigs. When I installed > > Centos 7.0, this error made the swap file 8070 megs instead of what I > > would have expected to be a over 16000 megs. > > You lucked out, honestly. You really don't want 8GB of swap on your > system. What will most likely happen is that you'll have a process that > starts running away eating memory, and it'll try to use all of that swap > before the kernel's OOM killer can kick in. You will not enjoy > thrashing 8GB of swap for probably hours. > > Really what you should do is drastically reduce the amount of swap you > have allocated, and reclaim most of that 8GB of swap space for storage > filesystems. In my experience, a few hundred MB of swap is more than > sufficient to be able to swap out seldom-used memory while not taking > too long to OOM. If you really find a need for more swap later, you can > allocate a swap file; it's slightly less efficient than a swap > partition, but compared to real memory the difference will be > negligible. > > --keith > I am sure glad I did not start over on the installation. Thank you to everyone for the information and education!!!!! Thanks again!!!! Greg