Swap ON or OFF in PfSense
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Hi, I'm performing a PfSense installation and I was wondering what could be the use of a SWAP partition, I have 16GB of Ram and I'm gonna use a little portion of it, probably 4GB with the plugins.
But there is something important that comes up my mind, that is crash dump info, I don't care much on the installation process (if it doesn't fail :D), I care about future crashes.
I have a few questions:- How much space should I allocate? I have no disk space issues, so also 32GB is fine.
- Encryption? I assume yes, but does it handle it automatically? I mean the key etc
- The system should be able to perform a crash dump anyway before a crash, or before the kernel goes in panic, so, the SWAP is just an additional security to get these info? (assuming I don't have any othr needs for a SWAP partition)
- What is the swappiness level suggestion from PfSense?
- Can configure the crash dump in the PfSense UI? Or do I need to SSH into it?
I'm not extremely familiar with BSD, hence I have few doubts and I need to stay away from crazy maintenances as I do with Linux :D
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Unless you have specific concerns about space or drive writes etc just accepting the defaults is fine.
In general pfSense should never use SWAP and of you see it swapping it's usually because something is misconfigured.
I still have some test systems that run from CF and on those I always disable SWAP because of the limited write cycles there.
Steve
