On Thu, Mar 25, 2004 at 02:21:24PM -0500, duncan brown wrote: > well, yes and no. the old '2 x memory = swapsize' addage is sort of > outdated. My suggestion, if you have a reasonably modern machine and have enough disk space, is to use 1 GB of swap. Period. Current Linux kernels, and current disk and bus speeds, just seem to fit 1 GB. With a little RAM it is possible to use a good chunk of that without being unusably slow. On machines with tons of RAM, having a "little" swap--an amount that is well less than your RAM--seems cheap and harmless insurance. On in between machines I have seen the kernel use swap even when there seemed no particular reason. It seems to like swap. Having less than 1 GB doesn't save much, and having more is hard to imagine using. An exception: if you have a specific data set that is X-big, then certainly make your swap plus RAM big enough to easily handle X-bytes with some extra slop. Also make sure your RAM holds your working set. Another exception: if you have a lot of RAM and are afraid of swap-based delays, experiment with using no swap. You might get the more predictable behavior of things either working or pretty much not working, without a long, drawn out degradation path. It is a simpler case, and whether it is useful depends upon your needs; I doubt this is a very common case. Otherwise, for the moment, 1 GB seems pretty nice. -kb, the Kent who wants his computer to degrade gradually instead of suddenly refusing to do things, but that isn't for everybody in all circumstances.
