Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
> I am wondering if there is any swap space allocated on the box I am
> installing Oracle onto.

No, there does not seem to be. Or at least is not in use. Maybe the original installator made a swap partition but forgot to activate it. Check with fdisk if any partition is marked as Linux swap. E.g. on the machine I'm using now:

# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 1247 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1             1        13    104391   83  Linux native
/dev/hda2            14        26    104422+  82  Linux swap
/dev/hda3            27      1247   9807682+   5  Extended
/dev/hda5            27        65    313236   83  Linux native
/dev/hda6            66       196   1052226   83  Linux native
/dev/hda7           197       327   1052226   83  Linux native
/dev/hda8           328      1247   7389868+  83  Linux native

If it's there, add an appropriate line in /etc/fstab.

> If there isn't can I add some by taking
> away from other filesytems, or do I have to re-install the OS?

Without doing anything, you can create a swap FILE rather than PARTITION. See man mkswap for how to make a swap file. In the long run I think performance will be better if you have a dedicated partition. You can resize your partitions, without reinstalling, with parted (see freshmeat.net).

If you have more than one disk, performance will improve with one swap partition on each disk.

Stefano

> > If you have more than one disk, performance will improve with one swap
> > partition on each disk.
>
> I think this depends on many factors. I have two hard drives, with a
> swap partition on each. Both are activated. However, the configuration
> is the default that Red Hat 6.0 gives me, and as such, it uses the
> entire first swap partition before it starts with the second. So I do
> not see from where the performance improvement would come. I would have
> to do something about the priorities of the partitions. They are
> presently -1 and -2. I guess I would have to set them both to -1 or
> something like that, to get it to use both at once.

Swap  pages  are  allocated  from areas in priority order,
highest priority first.  For areas with different  priori-
ties,  a  higher-priority area is exhausted before using a
lower-priority area.  If two or more areas have  the  same
priority,  and it is the highest priority available, pages
are allocated on a round-robin basis between them.

> Since I have so much memory (512 Megabytes) for a desktop machine, only
> 22 Megabytes are swapped out at the moment (and, IIRC, this is something
> of a record) and I almost never see any swapping take place. Therefore,
> for me, swapping performance is of little interest.