[TriLUG] SWAP size vs physical RAM size

[Brian Henning]

Hi Gang,

I built a server some time ago.  When I built it, it had 2GB physical
RAM, so I created a swap partition 4GB in size (somewhere along the way
I picked up swap = 2x physical as a rule of thumb).  I'm about to
upgrade the RAM to at least 4GB; possibly 6 or 10 GB (depending on the
capabilities of the motherboard).  It's not a simple matter at this
point to create a 8 - 20 GB swap partition (until other hardware
upgrades are made), so my question is, how crucial is it to have a swap
file a lot larger than the physical ram space?  Out of the current 4GB
swap, with 2GB ram, only 73.4 MB of swap is actually in use (according
to top).  With that kind of current usage metric, am I likely to see a
lot of problems if I up the physical ram without upping the swap file
for now?

Primary use of this box is a VMWare host.  Later hw upgrades hopefully
include an external SCSI drive array to allow one physical HD per VM, or
at most two VMs per physical HD.  At that point, conceivably an entire
drive could be dedicated to swap space if necessary.

Thanks,
~Brian


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Brian A. Henning
   DataDirect
Support Engineer
  888-332-6797
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