Re: Maximum swap space?

H. Peter Anvin
2003-06-07T21:30:51Z

Followup to: <33435.4.64.196.31.1055008200.squirrel@www.osdl.org>
By author: "Randy.Dunlap" <rddunlap@osdl.org>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> From http://www.xenotime.net/linux/doc/swap-mini-howto.txt:
>
> 3. Swap space limits
>
> Linux 2.4.10 and later, and Linux 2.5 support any combination of swap
> files or swap devices to a maximum number of 32 of them. Prior to Linux
> 2.4.10, the limit was any combination of 8 swap files or swap devices. On
> x86 architecture systems, each of these swap areas has a limit of 2 GiB.
>

2 GiB is getting a bit tight, especially with tmpfs, ust like the
previous limits of 16 MiB and 128 MiB were getting tight at various
points, and it's annoying to have to make multiple partitions.

tmpfs is a good thing -- in my experience even if it is stored
primarily on disk it is much faster for temp files than any other
filesystem, simply because it never has to worry about consistency.
This means it's entirely reasonable to have a "farm" machine with a
40 GiB tmpfs used for everything except the OS itself.

-hpa
--
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