Max size of swapspace - 2GB?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 02:53:34PM -0400, Fraser Campbell wrote:
> I have been creating >2GB swapspaces for quite a while.  Recently I read 
> the manpage:
> 
>     The maximum useful size of a swap area now depends on the
>     architecture.  It is roughly  2GiB on  i386,  PPC,  m68k, ARM, 1GiB
>     on sparc, 512MiB on mips, 128GiB on alpha and 3TiB on sparc64.
> 
> As a test I just created a 3GB swapspace (single logical volume) and 
> then had a few programs suck up all the RAM.  I saw 3GB of real RAM used 
> and 3GB of swapspace used before the server ran out of memory.
> 
> Based on my test I assume that the manpage is just out of date, or am I 
> missing something?  My test was with 2.6.5 kernel (SuSE 9).

The man pages often become out of date.  I think this is such a case.  I
believe 2.6 kernels can handle much larger than 2GB swap space.  On the
other hand I can't imagine how awful the system must run when it is
using even 1GB of swap. :)

Lennart Sorensen
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