Ian Jackson <ijack...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes: > Uhhh. You run your systems with no swap at all ?
> That's your prerogative, of course. But it's far from a default (or > recommended) configuration. I think that if you configure your system > without swap, it is up to you do whatever else is necessary to make it > work. That might involve making /tmp not be on a tmpfs (if it is the > default for some reason). I never use swap on servers any more. My experience is that swap is so slow that if the system starts using swap, the services are all essentially down anyway, and they're down in pretty much the worst case scenario for clients (extremely slow and unreliable returns with no clean "server is down" signal). It's generally better for the system to panic or start killing random processes than for it to go into swap. This depends heavily on what type of server you have and what your situation is, of course. But swapless configurations are pretty common these days in large-scale server farms that already have to tolerate any one server going down. It's a lot easier to tolerate a server just going away than a server that goes into pathological performance from using swap. Desktops and laptops are obviously a different issue with different tradeoffs. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
