Re: Debian's recommendation for the size of the swap.
zhaoway@njlug.org wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 14, 1998 at 11:34:16PM +0300, shaul wrote:
>> (1) Linux accept up to 128MB for a single swap partition (2) There is
>> (was) a rule of thumb to have a swap size as twice as the RAM the
>> machine has (3) Having more RAM reduces the needs for swap.
>
> ya konw, i'm a little confused. people say more RAM reduce the needs for
> swap while swap is recommended for double size of RAM ? yeah, newbia i
> am :-P
That swap must be >= 2*RAM is a common misconception in the Linux world.
On BSD's this is a good rule of thumb, due to a different VM[1] subsystem
design but on Linux only the RAM+swap figure matters.
The only general rule for swap size is that you should have enough. That
means that RAM+swap should be large enough to run the programs you are
likely to run at any given time.
Note, however, that you should always have *some* swap, even if all your
programs will fit in RAM, to allow the kernel to swap out unused pages and
make room for more buffers. Similarly, you should always have some unused
VM to allow for extraordinary memory requirements and to make room for
buffers. Did I mention that buffers are a good thing? :-)
It is, of course, better to have too much swap space than too little.
Horrible things will happen if you run out of VM: processes will be
randomly killed off, the system may crash, etc.
> i'm currently use 12M swap with 64M RAM, is it too few ? i feel ugly
> when open *guash*, and xemacs and netscape opened very slowly. i only
> have 2G hd, and 750M among it is spared for win98 'cause i need its
> support for chinese stuff.
I would probably add some some swap space, but as I outlined above, this
is a very individual thing. My box has 64MB RAM + 96MB swap and it seems
quite happy with that configuration. However, I probably use more VM than
most people...
[1] VM = Virtual Memory
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