On Sun, 2005-03-06 at 19:44, James Knott wrote:
This was more of a curiousity type question. Also, IIRC, you can have multiple swap partitions, so terabyte swap space is now a possibility, though I'd imagine exabyte swap is still a while away.
Incidentally, it wasn't all that long ago, that a fried was bragging that he had a total (4 or 5 drives) of 1 GB disk space on his OS/2 system!
I allready though so, For most "normal" situations, sysadmins consider swap nowadays more as a protection meganism against kernel panics. Used to be different. I recall the days (on a dec vax/vms 780) and several hundred people working on it, and on piek moments during the week, most of us were watching which users were swapped out ;-)) At that time "swapped/paged-out" was a fact of life. But since then, CPU, cache and mem-speed have rissen 1000-fold; while "background" -memory, or disks in general perhaps 10 or 20-fold. So the effect of a process being swapped out of main-memory is felt much more. At the HP-UX training classes we were told if a system was using swap intens and for a longer period, one should prepare for several things: -Complaining users (bad system response) -Looking for bad code -Start procedures for buying additional memory So over-commiting your memory (thus swapping) is something to avoid at all costs. Only perfect sense for swapping a processes on purpose, might be in a cluster environment, to re-distribute cpu-load.... But that's getting OT... Hans