Does anyone have any guidance on swap and memory configuration when
running R v2.15.1 on UNIX/LINUX? Through some benchmarking across
multiple hardware (UNIX, LINUX, SPARC, x86, Windows, physical, virtual)
it "seems" that the smaller memory machines have an advantage.
Typically my organization builds their UNIX servers at a 1:1 physical
memory:swap configuration. We plan on running some tests where we set
have swap at 1:1, 0:1 and 1/2:1 to see if there is any benefit and to
what degree.
My first assumption is that it would depend on exactly what I am doing
in R and that fact would need to be taken into account to the
observations and testing I am doing. To be clear, I've not approached
writing any parallized code other than what R might do out of the box.
However, what testing I have done (using a standard deviation test as
well as a GBM model) seems to indicate that the Windows desktop (with
small/slow swap footprint) as well as a Solaris 11 X86 server with swap
set to half of physical memory seems to perform quicker for these
scenarios than an physical server with 16CPU's and 48GB memory.
I found a few articles searching the group, but they seem to factor
around Windows performance considerations (for example, post entitled
"Re: [R] Memory limit for Windows 64bit build of R" from a few months
ago.)
I do plan on running through these different configurations on my own to
test out R, but wondered if the community had any experience with swap &
memory configuration when running R on UNIX/LINUX configurations.
Thanks in advance.
Anthony
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