How Much Operating System Paging is Acceptable?

Definition

How much operating system paging is acceptable depends largely on the database server and the application servers.

On the database server, the I/O activity to the disks is normally quite high due to accesses to the database. Additional operating system paging should therefore be avoided to prevent an additional bottleneck. On the application server, disk accesses are usually less frequent. Therefore, operating system paging using a large buffer can be more efficient than a buffer which is too small which would lead to multiple database accesses and increased network traffic.