Re: swapfiles & 512MB+ RAM?

["nate" <debian-user@aphroland.org>]

MRZ said:
> With the price of RAM being what it is, I recently upgraded my
> potato box to by 512MB ram.  So I now have roughly 640MB RAM with a
> 256MB swapfile.
>
> Now that I have this much physical memory I was wondering if I
> could drop the swapfile altogether and reclaim some HD space for
> filesystem use.
>
> I'd appreciate any pro's and con's..

with the price of HD being what it is, 256MB of space for
swap seems minimal. i personally run several machines
ranging from 256MB to 1GB of ram(i never install a machine
with less then 256MB). all of them have at least 128MB of swap.
the machine im on at the moment has 768MB of ram and 170MB of
swap. my firewall has 1GB of ram and 512MB swap. i have a rsync
server at the office that has ~640MB of ram and 1GB of swap(the swap
is on a 6-disk raid10 array so access is fast ..)

i probably never touch swap, but i keep it there just incase..
while these stats are outdated you can take a look at the
memory usage on my firewall here:
http://portal.aphroland.org/mrtg/mem/kbmem.html
(haven't updated since july)
green is USED, blue is AVAILABLE.
(average usage is 751MB)

swap is here:
http://portal.aphroland.org/mrtg/mem/kbswap.html

note that is total used memory including disk cache. not just
meomry used by apps.

so in the end....i'd keep at least 128MB of swap around
depending on the system(if its a server at least 256-512MB
swap). and if your using linux 2.4 it is even more important.

i can't think of any con's, other then unless you have
minimal disk space (say 4GB or less ?)

i also like to spread swap accross drives evenly and mount
them with equal priority to "raid" it.


nate