[Novalug] Can someone please settle this?

Jim Swanson swanson.james@gmail.com
Tue Jun 17 11:42:43 EDT 2008


On Tue, 2008-06-17 at 11:38 -0400, Megan Larko wrote:
> Jim Swanson wrote:
> > I hope this goes through.  Anyway, performance wise, which is faster,
> > having a dedicated swap partition or swap partition and a swap file on
> > another partition?  Thanks.
> 
> Hello,
> 
>  From my limited understanding the swap partition and swap file are on 
> disk.   This will only be accessed when the memory resident on the 
> computer is fully in-use.    Having a swap partition/swap file will 
> prevent a system crash from running out of memory, but disk just is not 
> inherently as fast as memory.   So--- to answer your question, 
> performance-wise, put more, better, faster memory into your motherboard 
> in as far is the mb will support it.   Along with that I usually have a 
> swap partition to catch the "overflow".   If I can, I have the swap 
> partition on a 10,000 rpm disk.
> 
> Most of the systems at my office have the OS on a 10,000 rpm disk and a 
> swap partition of 1Gb to 2Gb is a part of that.  The Tyan motherboards 
> we use usually have 16 to 32Gb of memory on them.   Yes, we've run out. 
>   We have folks who are trying to run jobs requiring up to 64Gb RAM. 
> The one mb we bought said that it could do that with an asterisk meaning 
> that it had not been tested.   When we actually loaded the mb that far 
> it could not run that amount of RAM.   So a word to the wise and do you 
> hw research carefully.
> 
> megan
> 
> > 
> > Jim
> > 
Megan,

This system is a RHEL 4 server running Oracle 10g, with 4GB RAM and
1.3TB RAID.  The person "building" the system just hit default for
everything during the setup, and installed EVERYTHING on the disk.  The
only problem with this approach is the installer only allocates 2GB of
space for the swap partition, and Oracle really needs at least 4GB.  His
solution was to just go ahead and add a swap file.  But I believe that
the system will take a performance hit doing it that way, hence the
question.

Jim




More information about the Novalug mailing list