[Discuss] AWS Linux server scaling question

[blu at nedharvey.com (Edward Ned Harvey (blu))]

> From: discuss-bounces+blu=nedharvey.com at blu.org [mailto:discuss-
> bounces+blu=nedharvey.com at blu.org] On Behalf Of David Rosenstrauch
> 
> 2) IIRC, most of the AMI's out of the box are not configured with swap
> space.  So if the box starts to max out on memory conceivably bad things
> can happen.  Might be something to look into changing.

If you're running out of memory and thrashing the swap space, then bad things happen.

Elsewhere, where they use swap by default, and their webservers were running out of memory under load, I had to trim the swap size down to zero or tiny (100M) just to make sure apache *would* die when it requests more memory than the system has.  And then obviously, setup alerting and deal with the memory shortage, etc.