Swap faq announce

[Sam Tygier]

you should probably reply to the list aswell, but i'll send to your email, and the list

Yannick Le Saint (kyncani) wrote:
>   Thanks for your feedback :)
> 
> On Sun, 2005-05-15 at 13:40 +0100, Sam Tygier wrote:
> 
>>You might want to change the 
>>"If you have n Mb of ram, you need between n and 2*n Mb of swap"
>>i am not sure everyone will recognise * as multiply, 2 x n, might be better. prehaps giving an example might help, eg
>>
>>"So if you have 256 MB of ram then you should use between 256 and 512 MB of swap"
> 
> 
>   I'll change that, and also change the simple rule to give the reader a
> straight answer.

cool
 
>>also no answer yet to the question, i turn off swap on my laptop, will i get more batter life? i have 768mb of ram, so i dont really need swap do i?
> 
> 
>   Well, all in all, i don't think so. Is there a reason to think
> otherwise ? If you have enough ram, linux will swap out pages if it
> thinks this will decrease overall disk access (increasing the amount of
> available cached memory). Maybe i'm wrong ?

that does sound possible. i just feel that under some work loads (eg browsing the web) that the harddrive should be able to spin down for the whole time. i am happy that my system is stable enough not the crash and loose everything that is in the write cache, but i imagine the swap requires disk access every few seconds.
maybe we need to seek help from the ubuntu kernel gods (whoever they might be)
 
>>is there a recomendation that the swap partition should be the first partition, or last or something like that, because its the faster bit of the disk?
> 
> 
>   I'm not sure about that. first partitions are said to be faster, but
> i'm not sure about the effects for the entire system. Also, setting the
> swap as the last partition may help changing your partition scheme (it's
> often possible to extend a partition but not to move it) ...

again need help from kernel gods

>>are there special cases if i have very large or very small amounts of ram?
>>if i had 4 or 8 GB of ram should i still follow the between n and 2*n Mb recomendation?
>>if i had only 16 or 32mb, would a large enough swap let me run gnome or kde?
> 
> 
>   Yeah, i thought about that, i'll include these cases in the faq.
> 
> 
>>anyway, good start
> 
> 
>   Thanks :)

thank you really, your doing all the work :-)

sam