Swap of 4 Gigs

[Gabriel Dragffy]

When RAM sizes where relatively very small such as 8MB then a swap of
double this was 16MB which is fine and a good idea. The same if the RAM
was 64MB or so. Recently avery RAM capacities have sky rockets and
having a 1GB swap file for 0.5GB RAM is ridiculous (unless you have
specific requirements). I have half a gig of RAM and the same size swap
file, but even that's over-kill, right now only 18.5MB of the swap is
being used and half of the physical RAM is still free. At the moment I'm
running openoffice calc, evolution, firefox with several tabs, totem
(playing music), several instances of nautilus, gaim, utorrent (in
wine), terminal, in the background i've got apt-cacher running. So
following the advice that was given 4 or more years ago just doesn't
make sense.

By the looks of things I could be running with 0 swap, and there was
once a time when my swap got disabled and it took me 2 days to notice
and that was by accident.

My advice is if you have half a gig of RAM then half a gig of swap is
more than enough, if you have a gig or more of RAM then 500MB or less of
swap will be fine. Like I said before, unless you have specific
requirements (maybe you're trying to run all office apps and US Army Ops
at the same time ;) )

On Thu, 2006-11-16 at 05:05 -0700, Scott wrote:
> Raphael Schneider spake thusly on 11/16/2006 03:56 AM:
> > On Thursday 16 November 2006 05:33, Guillermo Garron wrote:
> >> .... 
> >> Just because, i was planing to add another GIG to my system to make it
> >> 2 Gig RAM and mantain the "rule" of having the swap doubles the RAM.
> > I remember also the advice (some years ago) that the size of the swap 
> > partition should be twice the RAM installed. But one or two years ago I read 
> > that the size of the swap partition should be the size of RAM. See
> > http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Partition/requirements.html#SwapSize
> > for a description how to choose (and the max. size) the swap size.
> 
> I've read that your swap should be.....
> 
> 		A) Twice your RAM
> 		B) 150% of your RAM
> 		C) Equal to your RAM.
> 
> Everybody seems to have their own opinion. I don't have my own at all.
> But I've read all of the above.
> 
> Since I've got more HD space than I know what to do with, I let the
> installer decide.   I have 2GB of RAM. When I installed Dapper it took 4
> GB for swap.  When I later installed Edgy, it only wanted 3GB.
> 
> 
> -- 
> 	Scott
> http://angrykeyboarder.com
> © 2006 angrykeyboarder™ & Elmer Fudd. All Wights Wesewved
> 
>