Swap of 4 Gigs

[Kent Borg]

Steve Flynn spake thusly on 11/16/2006 05:26 AM:
> On 16/11/06, *Scott* <geekboy at angrykeyboarder.com
> <mailto:geekboy at angrykeyboarder.com>> wrote:
> 
> 
>     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.

Summary: If you might want to hibernate (not only for a notebook, but
some desktops will hibernate these days), have more swap than RAM.

Background: Until recently I had spent considerable time saying "1 GB
of swap is good".  My logic was that disks are cheap these days, so it
isn't too much.  If you have only a little RAM, as much as 1 GB might
will help sometimes.  And if you have a lot of RAM having a little
extra 1 GB as swap seems good, keeps the kernel happy--it likes to
shuffle things away.

Now, I have changed my tune.

I have a notebook with 1 GB of swap and 1 GB of RAM.  Actually, the
swap is 1 GB decimal and the RAM is 1 GB binary (or 1 GiB).  So I have
more RAM than swap.  Bad news.  I like to hibernate to my swap
partition, not because it is faster than shutting down and booting
from scratch, but because it saves my context of open windows, etc.

Depending on how much RAM that crazy Firefox has gobbled up, I
sometimes can't hibernate, there enough isn't room in my swap
partition.  Next time I mess with my partitioning on this machine I
will give it 2 GB of swap.


-kb