Swap Space

[Daniel_Zangger]

Hi all, I would like to start a discussion regarding swap space which is automatically set on the appliances and open server. I have asked myself several times why a gateway should need more than 4 GB swap space. Why? Everybody who has seen a gateway using 2 GB of swap space or more will agree that the gateway is very slow or almost dead depending on the hardware. Also Timothy Hall stated that as "bad" in his Security Gateway Performance Optimization video.

So why for example does a 23500 HPP appliance with 64 GB RAM (R80.10 Take 462) have a 32 GB swap partition?

I know some people would say on a 23500 appliance you have 1 TB HDDs and that's more than enough disk space. But if you have a lot of memory e.g. 64 GB and smaller HDD disk space is wasted.

After searching for "red hat swap size recommendation" the first result showed a table at the Red Hat Customer Portal which recommends at least 4 GB swap space if you have more than 8 GB RAM. That means 4 GB swap space is the minimum requirement as all 2016 appliances have at least 8 GB RAM. A default swap space size of 4 GB independent of the used appliance would stop wasting disk space...

[PhoneBoy]

The default swap size partition is a function of memory when the appliance was first installed (or last fully reimaged from an ISO).

That logic has changed from version to version as well, as I recall.

That said, gateways don't typically need a ton of storage.

Sure, you'll gain a few GBs by shrinking the swap partition, but do you really need that extra space?