Re: Where do you put your swap partition?
On Tue, Jan 22, 2008 at 05:08:14PM -0800, David Brodbeck wrote:
> On Jan 21, 2008, at 5:45 PM, Ron Johnson wrote:
> >The old "you need 2x RAM for swap" rule is hard to forget.
>
> I never really understood the rationale for that rule. It seems like
> a system with more RAM would need less swap, not more. In particular,
> it always seemed to me like it'd be a bit silly to use 8 gigs of disk
> for swap on a system with 4 gigs of RAM. Can someone explain the
> reasons for the 2x rule? Is there a performance boost?
I think it comes from BSD history where the kernel does active paging
and not just swapping when necessary. It increased the responsiveness
of the system for the programmes that were actively being used, at the
detriment for responsiveness of seldem used apps. Linux keeps swap
minimal while memory used is high; BSD kepts swap used to keep mem
mostly free.
Doug.
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