[plug] swap file on itanium

[Craig Ringer]

On Fri, 2004-03-26 at 22:19, John Usher (Maptek) wrote:
> I think this might be a mkswap issue.
>  
> I believe some versions of mkswap can't handle a file larger than 2Gb.

My RH8 system was limited to 2GB swap partitions when I built it -
whether this was a mkswap or kernel limit, I couldn't tell you. I just
used 2x2GB swap partitions, and haven't needed to touch it since - the
max swap utilisation since I put sensible ulimits in place has been
250MB. /Prior/ to setting up ulimits on accounts, I had one of the
user's GIMP instances go runaway and eat the full 4GB of swap, plus all
physical memory, before being OOM killed. Uggh. 

> I guess it's also worth mentioning at this point that swap partitions are faster than swap files....

Indeed. There's also no harm in having multiple swap partitions, so this
can potentially save some fuss. Come to think of it, multiple swap
partitions can be very helpful under some circumstances (generally when
you have multiple fast spindles available).

Craig Ringer