Managing swap
As I mentioned earlier in this book, the concept of swap is one that has been a subject of great debate, with some administrators even omitting it outright. When your server is running smoothly, you should never need swap. If your server does start consuming a lot of swap, it's definitely cause for concern. Swap space is a special partition (or file) that is used for memory when your physical memory gets depleted. It's not uncommon for a handful of megabytes here and there to be consumed by swap, but when serious swap space is used, it's usually the sign of a struggling server.
Theoretically, this space should remain idle and (for the most part) unused. In a perfect world, your server will always run efficiently, processes will never ...
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