HPUX 11.31 RX3600 Swap Best Practices

[CJENSEN_1]

Hello Gurus,
We will be acquiring an RX3600 server, running HPUX 11.31. We will most likely be getting 24GB of memory. I understand best practices are to have your device swap at least equal to the amount of physical memory. The disk layout will be as following: two internal disks (for the OS and OS mirror), and all other disks on our EVA4400. My question: where should the swap reside (should it be in vg00/lvol2, as in our 11.11 server), and hence, on the internal disks, or should it be on one of our EVA4400 disks? Thanks.

[B. Hulst · Accepted solution]

I would swap partitions on the internal disks.

Usually 2x size of physical memory will be enough. So 48GB.

[CJENSEN_1]

What disk size do you recommend then, for our two mirrored internal disks. They would need to contain the 11.31 OS, and appropriate swap (48GB)?

[R.O.]

If you have "pseudoswap" enabled (I think it is enabled by default in 11.31; look if you have the line "memory" when you issue "swapinfo -tam"), the 75% of your physical memory is counted as swap. So, I don't think you need 48 Gb of swap space. You might be ok with 24Gb of swap. Anyway, if you need more swap space in the future, is easy to configure it provided you have enough disk space.

Regards,

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Unless you boot off the EVA, swap should be on local disk.

I would do it just the way you did it on your 11.11 server.

Sizing is another matter. With 24 GB of ram, you don't need 48 GB of swap. Start out with 12 GB and see where that gets you.

SEP

[CJENSEN_1]

Thanks for the great information. Since we are a small operation, I will start out with a smaller amount of swap (12GB), and work from there. In terms of the internal disk sizing - do you think 72GB internal disks would suffice? I do not know how much space 11.31 takes.

[R.O.]

Yes, 72GB should be enough. Try not to use vg00 for things different to the Operating system.

Regards,

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom again,

No problem with 72 GB internal disks.

If you have a choice between 15,000 rpm disks and 10,000 rpm disks choose faster.

SEP

[CJENSEN_1]

Yes, the only thing we every put on the internal disks is the OS. Thanks for all your assistance.

[CJENSEN_1]

Many thanks for the great help!