![Alan Formy-Duval Opensource.com Correspondent](/sites/default/files/pictures/twitprof_400x400_0.jpg)
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United States
Alan has 20 years of IT experience, mostly in the Government and Financial sectors. He started as a Value Added Reseller before moving into Systems Engineering. Alan's background is in high-availability clustered apps. He wrote the 'Users and Groups' and 'Apache and the Web Stack' chapters in the Oracle Press/McGraw Hill 'Oracle Solaris 11 System Administration' book. He earned his Master of Science in Information Systems from George Mason University. Alan is a long-time proponent of Open Source Software.
Authored Comments
I'm glad Michael Hrivnak mentioned darksky.org. This is a real help to astronomers!
I'll first say, laptops are an exception due to the needs of hibernation. In server environments, I run with none or minimal swap. I started experimenting years ago when I was managing VMWare ESX. Since the ESX host box already had a decent sized swap, I found that I could reduce swap (or page file for Windows) on my guests. My theory here was that only the Host OS knows the real hardware situation. Swap is really a function of hardware - limited RAM to be exact. On systems where I have abundant amounts of RAM, I never see swapping occur. That's my brief explanation.