Enable auxiliary swap space failed

[Arockia Jegan]

"/sbin/rc1.d/S500swap_start start " script is failed to enable the swap space when the system reboots.

Error message (HP-UX 11.11)
***********************
Enable auxiliary swap space
Output from "/sbin/rc1.d/S500swap_start start":
----------------------------
Enabling device paging on /dev/vg00/lvols.
/usr/sbin/swapon: /dev/vg00/lvols is already enabled for paging.
Warning: swapon returned exit code: 1
"/sbin/rc1.d/S500swap_start start" FAILED

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But the system shows the swap volume if i execute the "lvlnboot -v" & swapinfo command. Looking like the swap volume got enabled by kernel and it's failing when the script try to enable the swap volume. I have 17gb volume as a swap volume. Can anyone give suggestions to solve this problem?

Thanks,
Arockia.

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi:

I suspect that you have added your primary swap device to your /etc/fstab. Remove its declaration from there and the 'rc' script alert will disappear.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Arockia Jegan]

So i guess the swap volume is enabled by kernel. Am I right? So I don't require to define swap volume in /etc/fstab file

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi:

Jim has indicated your problem. Primary swap is part of the boot data. Additional swap is added to /etc/fstab. I do question your need for a 17GB primary swap area; that seems very excessive to me - especially if you are mirroring the swap.

[Arockia Jegan]

I have 16Gb physical memory & have oracle software running on my system (V-class server). I want to use the same swap volume drive as a dump device. It's recommended that the dump device size should be larger than the phy mem to hold the phy dump when the system crashes.

[Alan Riggs]

At 11.00 it is no longer necessary to dump all contents of physical memory for a crash analysis.

Under any level of the OS, you will get much better swap performance (in the event that you ever exceed 16 GB of active memory usage) if you create several smaller (equal size, ideally) swap volumes and span them across drives and controllers.

If you mirror your root VG, then a large mirrored primary swap is an additional performance drain. You will od better ot create a small primary swap space and then unmirrored secondary swap.

Activating psuedo swap will allow you to fully utilize your memory without wasting so much disk space for swap space to be reserved but not used.