Re:Swap, swap, swap, and bad places to work
by toast0 on Friday August 09, 2019 @10:03AM
(#20654380)
Of course, having more ram would be more useful than having swap in general, but swap provides for a small cushion in case your usage grows over time.
If your load fits into 14gb and you get 16gb of ram and add 0.5gb of swap, when you see swap start to fill, you know it's time to look for memory leaks and/or get more ram. If you have a bigger memory leak / burst allocation, you have a chance of being able to connect in and shut the thing down cleanly.
There are some issues with kernels swapping out 'the wrong' pages, and filling swap early. But, assuming that's tuned, I'm not aware of a better indicator of you need more ram than your swap is full / swap i/o is high.
If your load fits into 14gb and you get 16gb of ram and add 0.5gb of swap, when you see swap start to fill, you know it's time to look for memory leaks and/or get more ram. If you have a bigger memory leak / burst allocation, you have a chance of being able to connect in and shut the thing down cleanly.
There are some issues with kernels swapping out 'the wrong' pages, and filling swap early. But, assuming that's tuned, I'm not aware of a better indicator of you need more ram than your swap is full / swap i/o is high.