[PC-BSD Testing] Swap and root partition sizes... wtf?

[Kris Moore]

On 08/24/2011 15:48, Bruce Cran wrote:
> On 24/08/2011 20:41, Kris Moore wrote:
>> On 08/24/2011 15:37, Bruce Cran wrote:
>>> On 24/08/2011 20:36, Jamie Ivanov wrote:
>>>> 2*mem was the rule of thumb 10 years ago. I've run bsd from 486's 
>>>> to multi-core xeon servers, I have *never* used more than 1G swap. 
>>>> Back in those 486 days the rule of thumb applied. But still, 9G of 
>>>> swap? Its simple to incorporate your "rule of thumb" with a logical 
>>>> limiter so nobody waste 9G on swap. With 4G of ram, I doubt swap 
>>>> will ever be used, it hasn't yet.
>>>
>>> I have a machine with 16GB RAM and would be rather disappointed if I 
>>> saw that 32GB of disk space was used for swap :)
>>>
>> What do you think the upper-limit should be on SWAP then? 2/4 or higher?
>
> I'd probably normally go higher, allocating 8GB even on a machine with 
> 16GB RAM - but that may be more suitable for a server system than 
> desktop - I know one reason to have 'plenty' of swap is to give people 
> enough time to notice that the disk is thrashing and run to kill the 
> errant process!  At least at one time it was also recommended to have 
> the same amount of swap as installed RAM in order to do crash dumps, 
> but I think we do minidumps by default now?
>

That makes sense. I've added some caps to the defaults of 4GB for the 
desktop, 8GB for server. Now let the bikeshed begin ;)


-- 
Kris Moore
PC-BSD Software
iXsystems