Bug#597087: swap space comparison with other distros

["Nelson A. de Oliveira" <naoliv@debian.org>]

Hi!

Comparing Debian with other distros, using 2 GB of RAM and a disk with 1.00 TB,
we have this (using the default partition layout of the installers, full disk):

Debian:
7.0 GB /
6.2 GB swap
1.1 TB /home

Mandriva One 2010 Spring:
12 GB /
3.8 GB swap
1008 GB /home

Fedora 13:
500 MB /boot
Inside LVM:
  50 GB /
  969.56 GB /home
  3.93 GB swap

CentOS 5.5
101 MB /
Inside LVM:
  1019.9 GB /
  3.93 GB swap

openSUSE 11.3 and openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 2 of 6 - Build 0754:
2.01 GB swap
20 GB /
1001.99 GB /home


The maximum swap space created by the other distros is about twice the size of
RAM (openSUSE is using the same size of RAM), while Debian is using three times.
Debian is also the distro that creates the smallest root partition.

I know that they are different distros, with different priorities, objectives,
etc, but it's just to show that maybe 300% the size of RAM is too much for
contemporaneous machines.

Best regards,
Nelson