Lustre discuss - Jun 2006 - Running OST's and MDS' Without Swap Space? A bad idea?

Hello,

Is it advisable to run Lustre OST''s and MDS'' without a backing
store?
Are there production systems running w/o swap space on the OST and MDS
nodes? If not, should I be using a dedicated swap disk, or is it OK to
setup a swap partition on the same backing device that Lustre uses?

I am running 1.4.7beta2 on dual dual-core AMD Opteron 270 systems with
4gigs of dual-channel ECC DDR400 RAM. Each OST has an ATA-133 320GB
disk. The OST''s and MDS'' are dedicated to running Lustre
exclusively.

Presently, I do not have any swap space configured on the MDS and OST
nodes. Only the Lustre clients have swap space -- on a dedicated
ATA-133 disk. Every node in the cluster has 4gigs of RAM.

Thanks

On Thu, 22 Jun 2006, EKC wrote:
> Is it advisable to run Lustre OST''s and MDS'' without a
backing store?
Lustre server processes are kernel threads, and their data will never be 
paged to swap space. If your servers are dedicated to Lustre, you will 
probably never use your swap area.


-- 
Jean-Marc Saffroy - jean-marc.saffroy@ext.bull.net