18G for Swap

L

Link01

Hello fellow users,

I am new to this message board and new to FreeBSD. Recently I've installed FreeBSD 9.0 from the PC-BSD DVD. This helped me to install it on ZFS. The system works fine but there is a strange thing that I've noticed, the swap space is relatively large, 18G as mentioned by the top command
Code: 
Swap: 18G Total, 864K Used, 18G Free
The df -h displays the following:
Code: 
Filesystem              Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
tank0                    50G     81M     50G     0%    /
devfs                   1.0k    1.0k      0B   100%    /dev
/dev/label/boot0          1G     59M    867M     6%    /boot-mount
/dev/ada1s1             1.8T    1.3T    385G    77%    /data
tank0/usr                54G    4.1G     50G     8%    /usr
tank0/var                50G    144M     50G     0%    /var
/dev/ad10s5             104G    104G    736M    99%    /data2

As I remember, I let the install partition my hard drive, just because I'm a novice and it seemed a good idea at the time. The system has 8GB of RAM, so going by an old rule for swap 2 x EAM, 18G is just about right. I guess that my question is: do I need to modify anything about it? Is it too large?

Please post your thoughts,
Manny thanks in advance :)
 
There is no such thing as too much swap (or too much memory). The only thing that comes in mind is too little space for the file system. So, if you can resize the filesystem to take over parts of the swap (which is _not_ easy), you might consider it. I personally would just leave it like that ;)
 
There is a thread around here where people discuss not using swap at all when you have that much RAM but it depends on the applications you're using, too.
 
Well, I'm using the server for media sharing over samba, deluge and I would like to run virtual box but I get an error 2 when trying to install from ports, but that is a different topic.

Reading over the internet about ZFS, it is instructed to have plenty of memory. So I bought 8GB, RAM is so cheap these days.

The swap partition never filled up more than one MB. If the procedure to shrink it is too complicated I would just leave it like that :)

Many thanks for the reply.
 
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