Re: added memory, should I increase swap?
On Sun, Nov 18, 2001 at 08:59:01PM -0500, Peter Christensen wrote:
| I started with Debian 2.1 on my Pentium 200 MHz with 32 MB of memory,
| then upgraded with apt-get to Potato. I recently replaced the single 32
| MB SDRAM with two 128 MB SDRAMs.
|
| When I installed Debian I created a 32MB swap to match the size of the
| memory. Should I now increase the size of the swap to match the new
| memory?
I've got two systems with 256MB RAM each with 243MB and ~120MB swap
each. Neither system has used its swap much when I was doing normal
stuff. (when I intentially made an infinite loop in the python
interpreter just to watch the memory and swap usage, it used lots of
swap, but that isn't normal :-)). They both have 2.4 kernels (10 on
one, 13 on the other, but used to be 10 and 8 respectively). I use
the machines for average everyday workstation stuff, and also for
development -- mostly Java (that's what the boss and school like) but
also some python (wish I could do more). I even had Sun's J2EE
container and 'deploytool' and a java applet (using j2ee.jar and other
stuff) and (recompiling the stuff) running at the same time. That
caused about 40MB of swap to be used at the peak usage.
OTOH I have a 486 machine with 8MB RAM and ~32MB swap (only 320MB hd).
It thrashes a lot when you try and do something (eg upgrade) but it
can handle masquerading just fine.
Just put whatever amount of swap you think you'll actually use or need
or want in the future in it. (Just a note: the gnome applet doesn't
seem to correctly colorize the usage anymore, use 'free' to see how
much is used in buffers or cache)
HTH,
-D
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