Re: TMPDIR - Do we also need a drive backed TPMDIR ? [and 1 more messages]
Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:
> Uhhh. You run your systems with no swap at all ?
> That's your prerogative, of course. But it's far from a default (or
> recommended) configuration. I think that if you configure your system
> without swap, it is up to you do whatever else is necessary to make it
> work. That might involve making /tmp not be on a tmpfs (if it is the
> default for some reason).
I never use swap on servers any more. My experience is that swap is so
slow that if the system starts using swap, the services are all
essentially down anyway, and they're down in pretty much the worst case
scenario for clients (extremely slow and unreliable returns with no clean
"server is down" signal). It's generally better for the system to panic
or start killing random processes than for it to go into swap.
This depends heavily on what type of server you have and what your
situation is, of course. But swapless configurations are pretty common
these days in large-scale server farms that already have to tolerate any
one server going down. It's a lot easier to tolerate a server just going
away than a server that goes into pathological performance from using
swap.
Desktops and laptops are obviously a different issue with different
tradeoffs.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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