On Wed, 2006-12-13 at 21:17 +0000, Chris Jones wrote: > > The old rule-of-thumb was swap should be twice your RAM size. I still > > adhere to that, however if you ever get to the point where that's > > becoming an issue, you have other problems and performance will suffer. > > I think that rule was more valid a few years ago when ram wasn't quite so > available. Now most new systems have a lot of ram, and the factor of 2 is no > longer quite so important. With 1G or above I would probably just use the > same amount of swap as ram, not twice as much. As you say if you really need > more swap, you would be much better of shoving more ram in... > > > > > > That said, on my laptop I have 1.25 G ram with 1G swap (originally I had > > > 512M ram but upgrade a year back, and didn't increase the swap size as I > > > cannot easily repartition) . > > > > Did you ever think about adding a swap _file_? It's easily done. > > Yes, I did wonder about this when I upgraded. I might be wrong but reading > around I wasn't sure if suspend could handle a swap file though ? > > I told myself I would look into it if I had problems. None as yet so haven't > bothered :) > Typically swap is faster than ordinary file structures even if it is much slower than RAM. Many mother boards won't handle more than 2G of ram, but for really compute intensive applications I have configured UNIX systems with up to 6G of swap to go happily on my way using virtual memory to handle large data sets. YMMV. Regards, Les H
