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AIX Version 4.3 System Management Guide: Operating System and Devices

Adding and Activating a Paging Space

To make a paging space available to the operating system, you must add the paging space and then make it available.

Attention: You should not add paging space to volume groups on portable disks because removing a disk with an active paging space will cause the system to crash.

To improve paging performance, you should use multiple paging spaces and locate them on separate physical volumes whenever possible. However, more than one space can be located on the same physical volume. Although you can use multiple physical volumes, it is a good idea to select only those disks within rootvg volume group unless you are thoroughly familiar with the system.

The total amount of paging space is often determined by trial and error but one commonly used guideline is to double the RAM size and use that figure as a paging space target. If you get error messages like the following, you should increase the paging space:

INIT: Paging space is low! 

Another possibility is that users might get a message similar to the following from an application, in which case you would also increase the paging space:

You are close to running out of paging 
space. 
You may want to save your documents because 
this program (and possibly the operating system)
could terminate without future warning when the 
paging space fills up. 
Adding/Activating Paging Space Tasks
Web-based System Manager:    wsm lvm fast path
(Volumes application)

-OR-
Task SMIT Fast Path
Add paging space smit mkps
Activate paging space smit swapon
List all paging spaces smit lsps

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