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    Default swap size

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Problems Installing or Upgrading pfSense Software
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    • T
      trony
      last edited by

      Hello. I just installed pfsense 2.4.3 on a box with 8GB of ram and 120GB SSD. The swap size is 3881MB.

      During the installation, I followed the instructions online and everything I clicked on was default.

      Is this swap size correct? Shouldn't it be 16GB? (2x RAM)

      Thanks in advance.

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      • K
        kpa
        last edited by kpa

        You don't need swap for anything really. If the amount of free memory in your system starts to get really low your system will slow down to a crawl and no amount of swap will help you in that situation because the swap will still be hundred to thousand folds slower than the main memory, SSD or or not.

        One or two gigabytes of swap is plenty enough for the occasional swapping out of a few memory pages that the system does. Your system has more swap than it will ever use.

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        • RonpfSR
          RonpfS
          last edited by

          If you are using pfBlockerNG with very huge DNSBL tables it may use the swap space and that might become an issue as unbound behave strangly at some point.

          You can partition the drive during installation and change the swap size.

          2.4.5-RELEASE-p1 (amd64)
          Intel Core2 Quad CPU Q8400 @ 2.66GHz 8GB
          Backup 0.5_5, Bandwidthd 0.7.4_4, Cron 0.3.7_5, pfBlockerNG-devel 3.0.0_16, Status_Traffic_Totals 2.3.1_1, System_Patches 1.2_5

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          • stephenw10S
            stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
            last edited by

            What kpa said ^.

            If you're using SWAP at all that's almost always a sign something is misconfigured or you're trying to do too much with the RAM you have.
            With 8GB I would not expect to see any issues with anything unless you run Squid and Snort and don't limit their use.

            Steve

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