The guidelines for swap are a little misleading... "4.17.4. Recommended Partitioning Scheme... ...If you are unsure about what size swap partition to create, make it twice the amount of RAM on your machine (but no larger than 2 GB). It must be of type swap." Creation of the proper amount of swap space varies depending on a number of factors including the following (in descending order of importance): - The applications running on the machine. - The amount of physical RAM is installed on the machine. - The version of the OS. In general the following rule of thumb works well: > Swap should equal 2x physical RAM for up to 2 GB of physical RAM and 1x > RAM above that, but never less than 32 MB. Using this basic formula, a system with 2 GB of physical RAM would have 4 GB of swap, while one with 3 GB of physical RAM would have 5 GB of swap For systems with really large amounts of RAM (more than 32 GB) you can likely get away with less (around 1x, or maybe less, of physical RAM). Unfortunately, allocating swap is more of an art than a science, so hard rules are not really possible. One other note, both RHEL 3 and RHEL 2.1 support up to 32 swap files. However, due to limitations in the mkswap application under RHEL 2.1, the maximum size of those partitions or files can be no larger than 2 GB. The version of mkswap which ships with RHEL 3 does not have this restriction. Hope that helps! Johnray
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 113458 ***
This has been added to the recommended partitioning section of the Install Guide. Changes will be reflected in the next release of the documentation. Thanks for the excellent feedback, Johnray. :-)
Swap partition section of the "install guide" on web is still confusing. http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-3-Manual/x8664-multi-install-guide/s1-diskpartitioning.html#S2-DISKPARTRECOMMEND - Max single swap partition size... is this 2GB for _ALL_ RHEL3 supported arch? Say, those 64bit stuff, is it still 2GB? - I found RHAS 3 installer (anaconda, disk druid) accept larger than 2GB swap space (ex. 4GB) during the install. Is this supported? The hardware is IA32(NOT EM64T or AMD64) - Max number of swap partitions that kernel support... 16 or 32? I hope you will revise the Install guide, such as create a matrix of supported swap space and CPU architectures. Also put this info on RHEL's system limit configuration page. ( http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/configuration/ ) Regards, masanari
We've made a few changes for the next release of the documentation since this bug was last updated. I think you'll find the next release to be improved.