From the course: Linux: Storage Systems

Unlock this course with a free trial

Join today to access over 24,900 courses taught by industry experts.

Configure and manage swap space

Configure and manage swap space - Linux Tutorial

From the course: Linux: Storage Systems

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Configure and manage swap space

“

- [Instructor] Linux swapping, a desperate act. Hopefully you're not going to have swapping on your system, but sometimes better than the alternatives. A system that's swapping is over-committed and performance can drop dramatically. Orders of magnitude's slower, so it's a really big deal. Having swapped space gives the kernel some space to take things out of RAM to make room for other things that are running, so hopefully they can run better. The things being swapped don't get to run, and swapping, doing all the disk IO, can be slow. Sometimes it's preferable to not have swap space and have the kernel panic because it can't find memory and reboot. If you have a high availability system, you have a failover server, then instead of having one swap and be slow, it can be better to failover to the other one and reboot the first one. So if you want to have swapping though, you got to allocate it. So like we said, if you don't have swap space and there's not enough available RAM, the…

Contents