27/12/2023 23:23 1597355 - Swap-space recommendation for Linux

SAP Note

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1597355 - Swap-space recommendation for

Linux (/sap/support/notes/1597355) 
Component: BC-OP-LNX (Linux), Version: 3, Released On: 01.07.2011

Symptom
You want to setup a SAP system on Linux and evaluate the amount of swap-space
that is sufficient for your system.

Other Terms
Linux, Swap, swap space, swap-space, swap-space recommendation, paging, swapping

Reason and Prerequisites

Linux provides a special paging functionality to evict and reclaim memory pages
of applications from the physical memory (RAM) to a dedicated area on a secondary
storage (i. e. a disk). This functionality is called swap and the secondary
storage area is referred to as swap-space. The Linux swap functionality can
improve the overall system performance and system reliability. Not frequently
used memory can be temporally moved to the swap-space and frees up physical
memory that can be used for other purposes, i. e. page-cache. Furthermore it can
prevent an out-of-memory situation, when a system runs out of physical memory. In
this case Linux starts evicting memory-pages from the physical memory to the
swap-space until it can serve all memory allocation requests from applications.
The Linux swap-functionality is available on all Linux systems supported by SAP.

The swap functionality requires enough space on a secondary storage, typically a

partition on a disk or a file on a filesystem.

Solution
SAP recommends to use an amount of swap-space based on the table illustrated
below. Customers may decide to use more or less swap-space based on their
individual system configuration and their own experience during the day-to-day
usage of a system.

Physical Memory (RAM) Recommended Swap-Space

< 32 GByte 2 x RAM

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32 - 63 GByte 64 GByte
64 - 127 GByte 96 GByte
128 - 255 GByte 128 GByte
256 - 511 GByte 160 GByte
512 - 1023 GByte 192 GByte
1024 - 2047 GByte 224 GByte
2048 - 4095 GByte 256 GByte
4096 - 8191 GByte 288 GByte

> 8192 GByte 320 GByte

When running SAP systems, the use of Linux swap-space is mandatory. SAP
recommends to setup a dedicated swap-partition on a fast storage, like a system
internal HDD, RAID-Array, SSD or a LUN in a SAN.

In the past, SAP recommended to use a swap-space with a size of two times the
amount of physical memory (RAM). For systems with up to 32 GByte RAM, this
recommendation remains valid. For systems with more than 32 GByte RAM, the amount
of swap-space in proportion to the physical memory can be reduced. This non-
linear swap-space recommendation has several reasons:

Systems running SAP with more than 32 GByte RAM (64 GByte swap-space) are usually
not able to efficiently use the high amount of swap-space without running into a
performance degradation. The reasons is, that a swap-space area on a disk is
usually much slower than the physical RAM. Upon a certain swap-space usage, the
swap-in and swap-out I/O activity may seriously slowdown or even completely
freeze a system. A high swap-usage and increased disk I/O activity indicates that
a system is already in an unhealthy state. This is slightly depending on the SAP
workload (SAP system and database). Appropriate steps by the System-
Administration have to be initiated in any case in order to secure the operation
of the system.

Swap-space areas are typically stored on partitions resisting on local disks.

Huge amount of disk-space for the exclusive swap-space usage can be quite
expensive on systems with large amounts of memory. Many blade servers do not have
enough slots to provide sufficient disk-space capacity. Furthermore, modern
servers are often equipped with smaller Solid-State Drives, that doesn't provide
enough disk capacity for large swap-space partitions.

Overview of the Linux swap mechanism (2.6.x based kernel versions)

During normal operation a Linux system tries to keep all application data in
physical memory. Linux uses swap-space to store inactive memory pages, evicted
from the systems physical memory, in order to free up physical memory capacity.
The operation of evicting memory pages from the physical memory to the swap-space
is called "swap-out". The operation of restoring pages from the swap-space into
the physical memory is called "swap-in". The swap-space is a memory area on an
external device, typically a partition on a harddisk or a file on a filesystem.
It is usually much slower than the physical RAM. Linux can use several swap-space
locations in parallel and merges all swap-space locations together to one large
swap-space area. Memory pages that are swapped-out into the swap-space, free up

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physical memory that can be re-used for other purposes. Swap-space is not a full-
qualified extension to the physical RAM, because it is not possible to read or
modify swapped-out memory pages directly. Instead, swapped-out memory pages have
to be read back into the physical memory when an application tries to access
these memory pages again.

Linux swap-space extends the physical memory in the way, that it is used to store
inactive memory pages, which are evicted from the physical memory in favor of
activememory pages or even memory pages from the page-cache. According to that,
Linux may prefer a bigger page-cache over least used memory pages of an
application. If a system runs out of physical memory, Linux evicts as many
inactive memory pages as needed from the physical memory into the swap-space in
order to be able to fulfill all memory allocation requests from applications. If
a system runs out of physical memory and out of swap-space, the OOM killer (out
of memory killer) starts to kill processes based on a selection-algorithm in
order to free up memory and to keep a system alive.

Reasons for swapping out physical memory to the swap-space

Linux starts to evict memory pages from the physical memory to the swap-space
under certain conditions:

Memory pressure: If Linux runs out of physical memory, e. g. if an

applications allocates more memory than it is physically available, Linux
starts to swap-out memory pages to the swap-space to free-up physical
memory. Before that happens, it will try to shrink its caches, like the
page-cache, buffer-cache and slab-cache.

Large amount of inactive memory and a growing page-cache: If the RAM

contains a lot of inactive memory pages from applications (for example SAP
shared memory areas) and a growing page-cache fills up the remaining memory,
Linux may decide to page-out some or all of the inactive memory pages into
the swap-space. This behavior improves the overall-performance in many
cases, but may also lead into performance problems under some circumstances.
More details about this behavior are explained in the SAP Note #1557506

Description of the Linux swap mechanism

The Linux kernel 2.6 uses the kswapd daemon thread for swap operations.
Additionally a direct-memory reclaim path exists, bypassing the kswapd, when a
system gets under heavy memory pressure that can not be solved by the kswapd
anymore. Kswapd only evicts pages from the physical memory that are marked as
inactive. The kernel scans memory areas in all memory zones and decides, based on
a LRU (least recently used) and a balance algorithm, whether a scanned memory
page gets active or inactive. The more memory pressure exists, the higher is the
probability for a memory page to get marked as inactive. Not all inactive memory
pages are swapped-out immediately. Another algorithm decides how much of the
inactive memory is required to be swapped-out to the swap-space. The kswapd is
invoked by the Linux memory allocator if the available free memory of a zone gets
below a certain value.

In opposite of swap-out, the swap-in mechanism restores a page from the swap-
space into the physical memory. This is being done, if a process tries to access
a memory page in the virtual memory address space, that is currently not resident

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in the physical RAM, a so called page-fault. After a page has been read back into
the physical memory, it is not being deleted immediately from the swap space.
Instead, the page-table information of this page is stored in the Swap-Cache. If
this recently restored memory page has to be swapped-out again and has not been
modified in the meanwhile, it is still identical with the already existing copy
in the swap-space. In this case, the systems decides, based on the information
stored in the swap-cache, that this page can just be removed from the physical
memory without having the need to do an expensive disk write operation.

The difference between paging and swapping

In Linux, the operation that moves a memory page from the physical memory (RAM)
to a secondary device (e. g. a disk) is called page-out. The operation of reading
a memory-page from a secondary device into the physical memory is called page-in.
This does not only include the eviction of memory pages from the physical memory
to the swap-space and reading it back into the physical memory. For example, it
also includes the synchronization of dirty memory pages stored in the page-cache
with their counterparts on the disk. Swap-space read and write operations are
referred to as swap-in and swap-out.

Attributes
Key Value

Other Components BC-OP-LNX-RH (Red Hat Linux)

Other Components BC-OP-LNX-OLNX (Oracle Linux)

Other Components BC-OP-LNX-SUSE (SUSE Linux)

This document refers to

SAP Note/KBA Title

171356 SAP Software on Linux: General information (/sap/support/notes/171356 )

1647204 BYD: Database is stopped due to insufficient memory (/sap/support/notes/1647204 )

This document is referenced by

SAP Title
Note/KBA

3296506 Swap Memory at 100% (/sap/support/notes/3296506 )

2371520 SysLog entry “Unexpected return value 1 when calling up DbSlR”

(/sap/support/notes/2371520 )

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2944508 All server memory being consumed by Linux buffers and cache (/sap/support/notes/2944508
)

2489136 DB6 error ADM0503C and Linux OOM (Out-Of-Memory) (/sap/support/notes/2489136 )

2369910 SAP Software on Linux: General information (/sap/support/notes/2369910 )

1944799 SAP HANA Guidelines for SLES Operating System Installation (/sap/support/notes/1944799
)

1647204 BYD: Database is stopped due to insufficient memory (/sap/support/notes/1647204 )

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