Hi,

I needed some advice about swap space.

I have installed SLES 10 SP2 x86_64 on an a server with 4 Xeon cores 3GHz4, 8G memory, and two 270G drives.

The SLES installer looked at all this and decided I needed a half gig swap. I think so anyway, a swapon -s reports size to be 554200. Is that how you determine the swap partition size?

I know the goal should be to never use the slow swap space, but this machine will be quite loaded with virtual guests. This seems low given some of the guidelines and formulas I have seen. Some suggest around 10G in this situation.

Is the SLES installer wrong here? I remember default swaps even on little machines being 2G. Or have kernel improvements led to smaller swaps.

thanks for any ideas,

Hmm, I always make swap at least the amount of my ram installed, but this has never exceeded 4GB. Here is an article describing methodology's.

Depending on what you are doing, you probably don't need 8GB of swap, but I do think the 512MB is too small. Maybe go in between and do 4GB. The above link may help you decide.