Re: OT: question about sizing swap for solaris

  • From: dantow@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 4 May 2004 10:24:46 -0500

Responses inline...

Quoting zhu chao <chao_ping@xxxxxxxxxxx>:

...
>
>     To Dan Tow, your words said that if swap size is small, application will
> hit "out of memory", while that whitepaper on sun.com says, more swap space
> than needed can actually cause hard-pageout to occur more easily. There is
> some difference between your opinion and the paper.

Well, I haven't read the still-unreferenced paper, but absolutely there is a
difference between my opinion and what the paper apparently says - to be
clearer, in my opinion: low swap size "prevents" page faults (by triggerign
errors, instead) only in the same sense that running out of gas "prevents" bad
gas mileage!

>     And you said , from experience, you saw some application with a lot of
> processes swapped out to disk, without performance impact on end user, is
> that an oracle database server? I think that will badly impact on system
> performance, according to my experience(Of course my experience is much less
> than that of yours).

My statement applies to database servers and non-database servers, alike. Where
I have specifically, quantitatively measured the true end-user costs of paging
and swapping, I have never seen them to be high, except on systems that were
victims of operating-systems swapping-algorithm bugs, which have long-since
been fixed. I *have* heard plenty of *anecdotes* about swapping and paging
being big problems, but I have never seen these stories backed up with hard
data. I certainly believe it's *possible*, though - you just need to buy less
memory than you need, in spite of how cheap memory is. I have gathered data on
a different subset of systems than you have, however, so it is entirely
possible you have seen one of those hypothetical systems with insufficient
memory.

>
> Regards
> Zhu Chao.

----------------------------------------------------------------
Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com
----------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe send email to:  oracle-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
put 'unsubscribe' in the subject line.
--
Archives are at //www.freelists.org/archives/oracle-l/
FAQ is at //www.freelists.org/help/fom-serve/cache/1.html
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Other related posts: