Re: Pre-allocation of shared memory ... - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Bruce Momjian
Subject Re: Pre-allocation of shared memory ...
Date
Msg-id 200306131710.h5DHA4P22365@candle.pha.pa.us
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Pre-allocation of shared memory ...  ("Nigel J. Andrews" <nandrews@investsystems.co.uk>)
List pgsql-hackers
I will say I do use swap sometimes when I am editing a huge image or
something --- there are peak times when it is required.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Nigel J. Andrews wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Jun 2003, Lamar Owen wrote:
> 
> > On Friday 13 June 2003 11:55, Josh Berkus wrote:
> > > Regrettably, few of the GUI installers for Linux (SuSE or Red Hat, for
> > > example), include adequate swap space in their "suggested" disk formatting.
> > > Some versions of some distributions do not create a swap partition at all;
> > > others allocate only 130mb to this partition regardless of actual RAM.
> > 
> > Incidentally, Red Hat as of about 7.0 began insisting on swap space at least 
> > as large as twice RAM size.  In my case on my 512MB RAM notebook, that meant 
> > it wanted 1GB swap.  If you upgrade your RAM you could get into trouble.  In 
> > that case, you create a swap file on one of your other partitions that the 
> > kernel can use.
> 
> I'm not sure I agree with this. To a large extent these days of cheap memory
> swap space is there to give you time to notice the excessive use of it and
> repair the system, since you'd normally be running everything in RAM.
> 
> Using the old measure of twice physical memory for swap is excessive on a
> decent system imo. I certainly would not allocate 1GB of swap! Well, okay, I
> might if I've got a 16GB machine with the potential for an excessive
> but transitory workload, or say 4-8GB machine with a few very large memory
> usage processes that can be started as part of the normal work load.
> 
> In short, imo these days swap is there to prevent valid processes dying for
> lack of system memory and not to provide normal workspace for them.
> 
> Having said all that, I haven't read the start of this thread so I've probably
> missed the reason for the complaint about lack of swap space, like a problem on
> a small memory system.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Nigel J. Andrews
> 
> 
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 9: most folks find a random_page_cost between 1 or 2 is ideal
> 

--  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610)
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