Extending Device Swap & clearing swap without restart

[KM_3]

Hi All,
1)Is there any way to extend device swap on discontigous disk space on same disk.

2) Is there any way to clear swap without restarting system

Khurram

[Pete Randall]

Khurram,

1) Yes, you can enable swap anytime with the swapon command. Use SAM or the command line to set up your swap area, then use the swapon command to enable it.

2) No, not really. You could stop all the processes running on the machine and they should release whatever memory (real or virtual) they hold, but that's about it.


Pete

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi Khurram,

1) Impossible to extend primary swap as there won't be contigous space. BUT you can add secondary swap on same (not recommended) are another disk. You have to make sure your maxswapchunks & swchunk kernel parms will support the extra swap space. You should use another disk to "spread the load" of swap access across disks. In fact I'd recommend you set the extra swap with a priority that will cause the system to use it first. Taking the load off the vg00 disk would be a good thing.

2) Not that I'm aware of. You could stop ALL programs to the point that nothing is using swap or reserving space, but that's no guarantee that *nothing* at all will be using it or reserving space in it as the OS itself may be doing so.

HTH,
Jeff

[Kevin Wright]

1) secondary swap doesn't have to be contiguous, although primary swap does.

2) no, you can't clear swap once it has been activated without a reboot.

[Steven E. Protter]

You can turn swap on while your system is running, but you can't turn it off without a boot.

I believe that swap areas at least primary must be contiguous.

SEP