[IRCServices] (Off-topic) Swap partition size

[Andrew Church]

>>I am running dal4.6.5 and services 4.2. I am running Red Hat 6.1 with all
>>the patches and updates. It is an AMD K6-2/350 with 128Megs of RAM and 3 gig
>>HD with 256meg swap partition. I am using a 3COM 3C905 PCI 10/100 BaseT
>>network as well, nothing else in the server, no extra cards or anything.
[...]
>First off, cut down on your swap parition.  With 128MB ram, you only need
>about 10% of that in swap space...

     Actually, the standard recommendation is swap size = 2 * physical RAM
size.  25MB is ridiculously small for a 128MB box, especially a server.
The smaller your swap space, the less physical RAM can be freed up for
things like disk cache, and the more I/O delays you'll get.  I personally
have 192MB of swap on my 128MB home machine, and it performs fine (not that
I ever touch swap memory most of the time).

     In any case, if you're so squeezed for disk space you need some of
that 256MB for file storage, go out and buy another hard disk.  Last I
checked, you can find 4GB SCSI drives for under $100 these days.

>Having larger swap paritions than which is actually needed, can
>in some cases actually slow down system performance... 

     This may have been true in the past, and may be true of other operating
systems *cough*Windows*cough*, but it doesn't hold for modern Linux, at
least not from what I've seen.

  --Andrew Church
    achurch at dragonfire.net
    http://achurch.dragonfire.net/
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