How Much Virtual Memory is Enough?

whitroth asks: "Ten years ago, Received Wisdom said that virtual memory should be, on the average, two to two-and-a-half times real memory. In these days, where 2G RAM is not unusual, and many times is not that uncommon, is this unreasonable? What's the sense of the community as to what is a reasonable size for swap these days?"

Comments

Not much, anymore...

[FishWithAHammer]

Under Windows it seems it'll swap out whether the free RAM is needed or not, no matter what (there's a registry setting to change this though). Under Linux, you won't swap much anyway unless you need it.

I run a Core Duo laptop with 1GB of RAM and have never swapped out in Linux, no matter what I was doing.

If you have enough, none

[bob whoops]

Back when I had 512MB of memory, I had a 512MB swap partition, but I noticed that I never came close to using all of it.

When I got my new machine with 1G, I never bothered to make one at all, and I've never had a problem with it. If I do ever find myself in a situation where I need some swap space, I could always just create a swap file. It's a lot more convinient because it wouldn't have to be a fixed size, doesn't take up space when I don't need it, and I have one less partition

Especially if you have 2G or more, I don't see a real reason to use swap

Re:If you have enough, none

[gfxguy]

you never know when some runaway process is going to eat all yer RAM and need to use swap... no matter how much RAM you've got.

Frankly, while I do use swap, in this case I'd rather have the process crash sooner rather than later.

Re:If you have enough, none

[EvanED]

Well, again, that depends; if your usage patterns don't cause enough memory use to justify swapping, and you're just creating a swap partition for the emergency where some program decides to break, then it hardly matters if your swap drives are slow, because they are never accessed.

I use this

[Anonymous Coward]

2X physical memory for under 2G RAM
2G swap for up to 8G RAM
+1G swap for every 4G RAM beyond that

Set it and forget it

[StikyPad]

According to MS, it's 1.5 times the total RAM. I assume you're asking because you're trying to avoid a fragmented page file. While the benefits of an unfragmented page file are dubious at best (since it will be randomly accessing different parts of the page file), it's better to err on the side of caution: If you have 2GB of memory, you likely have an equally compensating-for-something hard drive, so you probably won't miss 3GB of space, or even 4. It's better to waste a little space than have Windows run out of Virtual Memory. Otherwise, just let it do its dynamic page file adjustment thing.

If you're asking about creating a swap partition for Linux then 1.5X is also recommended. Just be generous, unless -- for some reason -- you've got 2GB of RAM and a 50 meg hard drive. Too much is always better than not enough.

Don't forget disk cache

[uler]

One of the real advantages of using swap isn't to avoid memory exhaustion at all; by moving infrequently accessed pages from memory you make more room for the disk cache, thereby possibly improving overall system performance by reducing hard drive reads.

But more on topic...

[Junta]

My strategy generally is to use a file for swap rather than a partition, even in linux. I figure that if memory has to be swapped in from disk, it's already crappy going to disk so the extra overhead doesn't matter much, and I have freedom to adjust it up or down depending on my needs. (This is a desktop/laptop circumnstance). I generally start at 512MB or so, increasing maybe if IO is faster on the drive. I view swap like a rumble strip on a road before a stop sign. With no swap, you don't realize a process leaked memory until it's too late, with swap, while it eats through your swap the performance will degrade and you'll see the end coming ahead of time, and may be able to head it off with a kill. It may be well an good your 4GB of ram is technically capable of handling the same load your 1GB RAM+1GB swap handled in the past, but having some noticable impact when things start going wroing is nice. I realize theoretically there are better approaches, but nothing gets in your face like poor performance and tons of disk accesses.

On a production server or a problematic system where I want support and the OS likes to dump a core to swap, I'll ensure a generous swap partition is available (generally observed active swapx1.5+physical memory size). In this case a file-backed swap may depend on layers of the kernel that are in an invalid state, and a swap partition is more likely to be reliably writable. The only system I would even theoretically hibernate on is my laptop, and I only ever suspend to ram or shutdown completely, so I don't consider my laptop as needing a swap partition of any significant size.

BSDs like more

[Just Some Guy]

According to FreeBSD's tuning(7) man page:

The kernel's VM paging algorithms are tuned to perform best when there is at least 2x swap versus main memory. Configuring too little swap can lead to inefficiencies in the VM page scanning code as well as create issues later on if you add more memory to your machine.

Disk is always far cheaper and more plentiful than memory. If you have four gigs of memory, what's wrong with carving eight gigs of swap out of your terrabyte RAID? If you have that much memory in the first place, then you're probably running large apps. Do you and them a favor and give them a little breathing room.

Rule of thumb...

[tachyonflow]

But... but... the rule of thumb says to have twice as much swap as RAM!

It's a pet peeve of mine that so many system administrators appeal to "rules of thumb" about decisions such as this, instead of actually thinking it through. Sys admins pass around these nuggets of wisdom with unquestioning reverence, like they were handed down from some bearded UNIX guru sitting on a mountaintop. These rules either 1) happen to reflect reality, 2) do not reflect reality, or 3) reflected reality 20 years ago but nobody got around to issuing some sort of "revocation rule of thumb". :)

My experience is that very little swap is needed these days, and the rule of thumb falls into category #3. Long gone are the days that the OS demanded swap space for all process memory.

If I have a machine with 1GB of RAM, I'll usually give it 512MB of swap or so. As discussed elsewhere in this thread, a little bit of swap is good for pre-emptive swapping and for emergencies (to avoid the dreaded Linux "oom killer".) Also, if you're going to use hibernate, you'll want at least as much swap as real memory.

But really, who cares?

[mcrbids]

My strategy generally is to use a file for swap rather than a partition, even in linux.

What I find curious is that you have a strategy. On what relevant experience do you base this strategy? 1 GB of disk space costs less than $0.50. Set up 3 GB of VM if it makes you feel good. The latte you drink while you set it up costs more than the extra disk space!

So go for it!!! Who cares what you do? Heck, give yourself 10x the RAM and see if it actually makes any difference!!! (it won't)

This is sort of like asking: "Which goes faster: the yellow Pacer or the red Pacer?"!