is it possible to have too much swap space?

[rob1101]

well I only have 1GB of ram and just because i like round numbers and had enough space. I made a 5GB swap partition. I don't really need the space, but can having a swap partition too big hinder my preformance?

[bigtomrodney]

Really when you get to 1GB of space you don't need swap anymore unless you are running particularly large programs/processes like databases/3d modelling/large graphic processing - and in that case you'd be better of with more RAM. Swap never performs as well as RAM so where possible ensure its use is at a minimum.

You can turn off your swap and see how you get on and enable it later on if you wish. Whichever way you go you certainly don't need 5GB of it, 1GB is enough for anyone.

To disable swap as root run

swapoff

and enable with

swapon

[devils casper]

Big SWAP space dont affect performance. SWAP size depends on how much RAM do you have and what application you are running.
If you have 1GB or more RAM then you dont need SWAP space. To be on safer side, create 1GB SWAP. It will be a disk space wastage otherwise.

[oz]

well I only have 1GB of ram and just because i like round numbers and had enough space. I made a 5GB swap partition. I don't really need the space, but can having a swap partition too big hinder my preformance?

I also have 1 GB of RAM but I do always create a 512 MB swap partition although it never gets used by the system, so I really don't need it at all. Of course I don't run lots of memory intensive programs at one time.

[i92guboj]

well I only have 1GB of ram and just because i like round numbers and had enough space. I made a 5GB swap partition. I don't really need the space, but can having a swap partition too big hinder my preformance?

Linux is good at these things, you shouldn't have a problem (performance-wise) for the fact of having a big swap partition.

The performance problem comes if you are using all that swap. In that case, the problem is not the swap itself (if you wouldn't have it the kernel would just close whatever it "thinks" it's appropriate. In that case, the problem would be that you would need more ram.

[rob1101]

ok thanks guys im glad to know that it wont affect my preformance i will resize the partition when/if i need the space.