What I do for a new machine?

Liam Proven lproven at gmail.com
Wed Dec 7 19:31:11 UTC 2011


On 7 December 2011 19:13, Dotan Cohen <dotancohen at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 19:23, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Shalom!
>>
>> Well, OK, yes, I am sure that this is true. But, OTOH, it is an easy,
>> safe guideline, very easy to remember and to work out, and disk space
>> is very cheap these days. A gig or two here or there is nothing when
>> terabyte hard disks are becoming common.
>>
>> I suppose the only time you would ever need even as much as 1.5×
>> physical RAM now on a modern PC is if you hibernated a machine which
>> was swapping very heavily.
>>
>> But then, not everyone is running a modern machine. I have installed
>> Ubuntu (well, Lubuntu) onto 2 or 3 machines with 256MB RAM in the last
>> year or 2 and several with 512MB.
>>
>
> On machines with less than a full GiB then I agree to use 1.5 or 2
> times the RAM. Also, I forgot to mention: to hibernate / sleep the
> swap should be as big as the RAM + the video memory! I have seen video
> cards with 1 GiB of video memory, so that is significant!
>
> Have a great evening!

Now that I did /not/ know! Ouch.

OK, so, you should have (physical RAM * 1.5)+(video RAM).

Easier to say 2*RAM, I reckon. The chances of video RAM being greater
than motherboard RAM are low, I reckon.

I seem to recall a kernel hack to allow swapping to unused video RAM,
if you have a modern graphics card but seldom use 3D graphics - as I
do myself, for example. That struck me as very clever...

http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Using_Graphics_Card_Memory_as_Swap

-- 
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
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