Feature #15691
closed
Simplifying use of external SWAP within GUI
Added by Jonathan Lee 3 months ago.
Updated 3 months ago.
Category:
Operating System
Description
Is there anyway to simplify the swap configuration for an everyday user, and or to make it easier? Thus someone just plugs in an external HDD drive and or usb thumb drive and configures it as a swap within the GUI? With the speed of ssd and usb drives this could give users an edge for smaller memory machines. Not everyone is tech savvy enough to configure a swap partition on an external usb and change the pfSense system to utilize it. Again it seems simple enough to creat a script to do this for users that want this. I have a 100GB old iPod drive configured and it seems to also stop many memory overflow issues, this could also mitigate many overflow problems under specific conditions. Let’s call it… Swap based Overflow Protections or (SBOP) options for average user understanding.
Currently the process to set this up it requires finding the drive mounting it and partitioning it, after changing the pfSense config to utilize the drive as a swap location. This could be all done with a script
Just to help with understanding, I now can update Snort and ClamAV at the same time and nothing is terminated because of memory exhaustion issues. Without swap it terminated Snort or Clam AV when updating you had to disable one or adjust the live reload on Clam AV configuration.
- Status changed from New to Rejected
No, the use of large swap volumes is discouraged in general, as is external storage. A little swap can be useful, but if you need a lot or overrun the RAM usage that often, it's more likely the hardware is underpowered or not suited for the load it's been given.
Anyone looking to do that needs to understand why they shouldn't, and making it easier would only increase the amount of users who run into problems because of it.
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