Default swap size

trony · May 27, 2018, 12:46 AM

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.

kpa · May 27, 2018, 1:02 AM

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.

RonpfS · May 27, 2018, 3:48 AM

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.

stephenw10 · May 27, 2018, 2:46 PM

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