What is best swap configuration ?

[Morphushka]

Hello. How do you configure swap on porxmox host machine ? I read different recommendations from: turn off swap at all to keep asa it is.
I have 64 Gb RAM and 16 is used by containers and 1Gb swap in the same time. Is it good or not ? What do you advice to do or not with swap ?

 

[wolfgang]

Hi,

in case off performance, it is best to avoid swap.
Generall if you use more and more swap your system performance will decrease.
I personally use swap only as Out Of Memory Killer protection and for this is 1 GB enough.

 

[LnxBil]

As a first layer, I always recommend using zram. Just install this package and reboot (or manually start the service).

@wolfgang Unfortunately, zram-config is still not in Debian. Any chance it'll be integrated into PVE?

 

[Morphushka]

As a first layer, I always recommend using zram. Just install this package and reboot (or manually start the service).

I read zram-config is just for desktop computers and it is not recommended for server systems. Can you provide example of usage ?

 

[LnxBil]

I read zram-config is just for desktop computers and it is not recommended for server systems.

Where do you read that?

Can you provide example of usage ?

I' unsure what to give here. zram is a layer of compressed in-memory swap so you use it like swap, but without disk io.

 

[wolfgang]

@wolfgang Unfortunately, zram-config is still not in Debian. Any chance it'll be integrated into PVE?

I guess no. We discussed it, but as far I remember we will not include it.

 

[Ansy]

Is zram-tools a full replacing package for Proxmox/Debian now? There's no zram-config in repos, but
apt-get install zram-tools -- and all zswap things just work, no need to reboot.

 

[LnxBil]

Is zram-tools a full replacing package for Proxmox/Debian now? There's no zram-config in repos, but
apt-get install zram-tools -- and all zswap things just work, no need to reboot.

Good to know. I was not aware of that!

setting up zram is always the same, just the stuff around it is different, I'd always use the Debian if there is one, otherwise fall back to the Ubuntu way (zram-config), but that is history now.

 

[spirit]

no swap for us in production. (but we carefully monitoring memory usage)