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Re: hibernate and swap partition size (newbie question)



Jimmy Wu wrote:
> From what I've read online, I get the general idea that in order to be
> able to hibernate/suspend to disk properly, the swap partition has to
> be big enough to hold all of the RAM inside it, right?
>
> Is it possible to hibernate if my swap partition is smaller than my
> RAM?  I have 2 GB of RAM, and when I installed Debian, I figured I
> would hardly ever need that much, so I made swap 1.4 GB.

IIRC the ram image is compressed using lzw compression.  Therefore it
actually depends upon how well things compress.  If you have good
compression then it would fit.  But if not then it wouldn't.  But it
is data dependent upon what is in ram at the moment.  Using lzw is not
really intended to reduce the amount of disk needed but is done as a
way to speed up the hibernate process.  Writing disk is slow and if
that can be reduced then hibernation is faster.  But it might work to
your advantage anyway.

With the big disks available these days it is actually a good idea to
have enough swap to avoid the out of memory killer.  Search for oom
and you will find a number of problems with it.  Having enough virtual
memory to avoid triggering it is a good thing.

Bob

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