What I do for a new machine?

[Amedee Van Gasse]

On Sat, December 3, 2011 13:42, Avi Greenbury wrote:
> 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.

I agree with your argument.
My *personal* rule of thumb at the moment is:

swap = ROUNDUP((maximum installable amount of ram) * 1.2, 0)

So if I have a 'puter with 4 GB RAM, but upgradeable to 8 GB RAM, then
I'll use ROUNDUP(8 * 1.2, 0) = ROUNDUP(9.6, 0) = 10 GB.