Hibernation woes

[Derek Broughton]

Ted Hilts wrote:

> Here are the results of the "free" command. Somehow I missed your email
> requesting the results of the "free" command. 

There wasn't a request about "free", but I was trying to find out what sort
of swap you had, and whether you have a "resume" option in the grub boot
options.  That doesn't matter now, because "free" makes the problem clear.

> My email shows 3 threads 
> under the primary thread so I may have accidentally read your request
> incompletely thinking it was a resend. I apologize! Thanks for your
> tolerance.
> 
> ted at Ubuntu:~$ free
> total used free shared buffers cached
> Mem: 2596008 1453768 1142240 0 268616 510000
> -/+ buffers/cache: 675152 1920856
> Swap: 854272 500192 354080
> ted at Ubuntu:~$
> 
> The above is with 5 desktops with at least 1 very big application and a
> dozen small applications and including VNC.

So you need a bigger swap partition (or perhaps just an extra one - I'm not
sure if hibernate can handle split partitions).

You have ~1.4GB of memory in use, and ~0.8GB of total swap space.  Some
compression occurs, and probably some memory that is known to be
discardable will be left out of swap altogether, but there's still no
chance that you can cram the memory being used for all that into your swap.

You've probably been misled by suggestions on the web that if you have so
much real memory, you don't need a large swap space.  And for normal
operation, that's true, because if you have more physical memory than you
ever use you won't use swap.  But since hibernation essentially works by
swapping out everything that's currently running, you need _at the very
least_ as much swap space as you have physical memory.
-- 
derek