What I do for a new machine?

[Avi Greenbury]

Rigved Rakshit wrote:
> swap = 4 GB  <-- since you have 2 GB RAM
> 

There is, generally, never a need to have twice as much swap as you
have RAM. That's an old side-note from (IIRC) a SunOS manual dating
from when machines swapped a good deal more.

These days, swap's generally used as an emergency when you run out of
space (but you're not going to go more than a few hundred MB into it
without the system getting unusable) and for hibernating.

A more appropriate caluclation, then, is:

swap = (amount of ram) + (amount of swap you might be using when
hibernating)

Which, in real-life, turns out to be approximately 

(amount of ram) + (a couple of hundred MB)

So, say, 2.2GB in this case.

-- 
Avi