UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

Update, mohtashims, I thought I would Google this for you and found a great little tutorial for you on this topic::

How to Permanently Disable Swap in Linux

So the answer is No.
You have these two swapfiles only, and they are fully used, and there is not enough RAM available to delete either of them.

Maybe you can increase your disk space?
Check with

Code:

lsblk
pvs

If a user boots a system without swap, the system will still boot and Linux will dynamically allocate memory, and is very good at it.

Yes, this could cause the system to run slower (not using swap) and thrash, but it can still be done.



So the "absolute" answer "NO" is not really accurate.

It can be done and the system will work if swap is turned off, but your performance could dive and the system thrash.

Is it a good idea? Well, that depends on the constraints the user is working under, but if it is working well now, why do it?

I have ran many Linux servers over the years with zero swap and they work fine, but I like to have a lot of memory in servers.

There is nothing wrong with experimenting; but you need to be careful of course if the system is a production system with critical apps in real or near-real time.

It does not hurt (if the system is not critical to production) to turn swap off if you really need to reclaim the disk space and for some reason don't want to add more disk space.

Having said that, both memory and disk space is pretty cheap these days, so why torture yourself about all this?

Is this a mission critical production server that you do not want to bring down to add disk space or memory?

Why not add more memory and / or disk space?

Thanks.

The system currently needs about 3.5 GB virtual memory. Disabling swap in /etcfstab and rebooting with 2GB will work, but will not allow the applications to run like before. It depends on the applications what exactly happens.
Of course adding 2GB RAM is the best solution! Then you won't need the swapfiles. (While with zero swap I don't trust the kernel to handle all memory pressure situations well.)

Also, memory is so cheap these days, why not use add a lot of memory, 16GB total for example, and have plenty of headroom.

I don't know the criticality of the application, but for the unix.com server, I like to have double the memory the system typically requires, for those days when things go south on the net or a process hangs, etc.

Code:

top - 02:18:33 up 68 days, 54 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.76, 0.52, 0.48
Tasks: 226 total,   2 running, 160 sleeping,   0 stopped,   1 zombie
%Cpu(s):  3.3 us,  0.4 sy,  0.0 ni, 96.2 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.1 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem : 65842320 total, 27976264 free,  3082788 used, 34783268 buff/cache
KiB Swap:  7995388 total,  7995388 free,        0 used. 61988500 avail Mem

But of course unix.com is critical infrastructure for many people on the net

So, I don't like any bits to swap, if I can help it, since faster is generally better for users.