System Administration Guide: Basic Administration

Planning for Swap Space

The most important factors in determining swap space size are the requirements of the system's software applications. For example, large applications such as computer-aided-design simulators, database-management products, transaction monitors, and geologic analysis systems can consume as much as 200-1000 Mbytes of swap space.

Consult your application vendor for swap space requirements for their applications.

If you are unable to determine swap space requirements from your application vendor, use the following general guidelines based on your system type to allocate swap space:

System Type	Swap Space Size	Dedicated Dump Device Size
Workstation with approximately 4 Gbytes of physical memory	1 Gbyte	1 Gbyte
Mid-range server with approximately 8 Gbytes of physical memory	2 Gbytes	2 Gbytes
High-end server with approximately 16 to 128 Gbytes of physical memory	4 Gbytes	4 Gbytes

In addition to the general guidelines, consider allocating swap or disk space for the following:

A dedicated dump device.
Determine whether large applications (like compilers) will be using the /tmp directory. Then allocate additional swap space to be used by TMPFS. For information about TMPFS, see Swap Space and the TMPFS File System.