How much swap?

[Ian Petersen]

> Do any of you gals/guys examine memory usage on long lived linux boxes?
> (I used the term long lived in the windows sense of the term , ie more
> than 2 weeks :P )
>
> 98% of boxes I've managed have never used swap. Never.

Your examples all seem to refer to headless servers.  My experience is
with my desktop, which I use for typical web/mail stuff, plus
development.

I've recently switched to using Eclipse to build an app based on
JBoss.  (Yes, it is about as ugly as you might imagine.)  I have seen
my system use more than the 2GB of physical RAM that I have.
Suddenly, I'll switch to check email, or something, and the app
doesn't come to the front immediately.  Then, I check gkrellm and see
I'm using 50% swap.  It's usually a sign that something's wrong, but
at least I have a chance to fix it before the OOM killer does
something I'd disagree with.

As for the uptime on this particular machine: I usually leave it on
all the time, but it's not on a UPS, and I stay fairly current with
the kernel, so I regularly get at least 40 days, and then reboot for
some random reason.

Ian

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