Hi Nicolas,
If you go higher and actually
intend to use all of this swap space, you will likely suffer serious
performance problems because the system will spend all of its time
swapping (a condition known as thrashing). "
A system will traditionally use swap space when it runs out of memory
for the task it's running. Think production environment with very heavy
load like database dealing with a LOT of requests etc.
A good tip taken from the RHEL 4 installation manual
(
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-4-Manual/x8664-multi-i...)
is "If your partitioning scheme requires a swap partition that is larger
than 2 GB, you should create an additional swap partition. For example,
if you need 4 GB of swap, you should create two 2 GB swap partitions. If
you have 4 GB of RAM, you should create three 2 GB swap partitions." but
bear in mind we're talking production server and not workstation.
i can't understand why if create a really big swap partition i will have
a performance decrease????It seems to me
that in the worst case scenario, i will be throwing disk space [because
the system will never use the swap partition if it doesn't need
it......why this would have a negative impact on the system......]
This is because you see it from the user point of view...
A home user with recent hardware will usually not suffer or notice load
on his/her machine. Go with the default from the installer.
thanks in advance,
Nicolas Ang
Hope this helps
Thierry
--
(o< Thierry Sayegh de Bellis
//\ RHCE
V_/_ UK