Do I still need swap space?

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 14:36:49 +0000

About three years ago I replaced our primary database. For years we’d been plagued by awful performance in the database and we were never able to diagnose the problem. The original server was a real beast at the time: 8 Opterons (single core), 32 gigs ram, and a fibre channel RAID connected via a QLogic HBA. This was back in 2005, so those specs don’t probably sound that impressive today, but this was a crazy configuration (with a crazy price tag to match). On paper it looked like this server should be basically invincible but the performance was awful, slowing down every process within the company. We contacted a few different companies (including CommandPrompt, which employs several of the core Pg devs) to see if they could assist us in diagnosing the problems but tuning only helped to a point. There was just something wrong with the box, maybe having to do with the FC HBA itself (which nobody knew much about).

I partitioned my laptop so stupidly.

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 11:25:26 +0000

When I first installed Linux on my laptop (on my old hard drive) I did it as dual-boot, so I resized my Windows XP partition down to 50 GB, created a 2nd partition for Linux and installed it there. I think I played around with Fedora and Ubuntu and one other distro (maybe FreeBSD?) so I had a bunch of stupid partitions. I eventually went to Linux exclusively and repurposed my XP partition to be my home directory (/docs) and moved all my documents there.

Swap on Evan Hoffman

Do I still need swap space?

I partitioned my laptop so stupidly.