System ground down to a halt

[Bret Busby]

On 21/05/2016, Tom H <tomh0665 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 6:51 PM, Paul Smith <paul at mad-scientist.net> wrote:
>> On Thu, 2016-05-19 at 16:56 -0700, MR ZenWiz wrote:
>>>
>>> I have 16GB of RAM with almost 13GB of swap space (holdover from when
>>> I only had 8GB - never updated). I'm running on an i7 (effectively 8
>>> CPUs).
>>
>> The old adage of "swap = 0.5x RAM" makes no sense for systems with >4G
>> RAM, which many systems have nowadays.
>>
>> Personally I would never add more than 2G swap to any of my systems,
>> regardless of how much RAM they have. 13G swap is _really_ asking for
>> trouble.
>
> Didn't the old adage predate s2ram (for which you need SWAP=RAM)?
>

My memory, from the time of Win95, etc, was that the swap space should
be twice the size of the RAM, and, when I first learnt UNIX, we were
told by the lecturer, that the UNIX kernel required 32GB of RAM, which
was why paging occurred. That was about 20-30 years ago, when BSD was
4.3, and SCO UNIX was System V v7, or something like that.


-- 

Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia

..............

"So once you do know what the question actually is,
 you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
 Chapter 28 of Book 1 of
 "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
 A Trilogy In Four Parts",
 written by Douglas Adams,
 published by Pan Books, 1992

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