Swap Question

[Kerry Hoath]

You can do without swap if you must; however allocating a few hundred megs 
of swap on a multi-gigabyte drive won't hurt and can in fact improve things 
in a number of ways:
1: If a process is idle and taking up a large amount of memory; it can be 
swapped out to disk to allow other processes to use the
memory. Think virtualization, web servers and the like.
without swap; when the kernel runs out of memory it will start killing 
processes; this can get ugly.
With swap; you notice the system is using swap and can do something about it 
before things go critical.
secondly: tuxonice and uswsusp 2 of the hybernate solutions for Linux write 
the suspend images to the swap space.
If you don't have swap then you can't suspend to disk.
s2both suspends to disk and ram; so if you power up the machine again from 
standby the memory image is used; if that fails the disk snapshot is used.

my personal recommendation is to allocate the maximum your physical ram is 
likely to be to swapspace, in your current case; 2gb of swap.

With large capacity drives beeing under 30 cents a gig; this is not really a 
problem in 2007.

swap partitions are faster to access; however if you allocate space to swap 
then get more ram you can allways add in a swap file. In fact; there are 
howto documents on how to share swapspace between Windows and Linux if that 
helps also.
Regards, Kerry.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Steve Holmes" <steve at holmesgrown.com>
To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Monday, January 07, 2008 5:44 PM
Subject: Swap Question


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> Hey, the swap question has come up for me now as I will probably be
> rebuilding my Linux environment.  The old days with small memory, it
> was recommended to have a swap something like twice the system
> memory.  But with larger systems, that seems less valid as I've been
> hearing.  I have 2 GB of main system memory and when I include the
> high-memory option in the kernel, I get all of it available to me.
> With 2 gigs, would it be necessary to have any swap at all? I mean,
> with this big a machine, could I go and install Linux and not have a
> swap at all? I will probably be doing Slackware again do to my
> familiarity with it.  When I looked briefly at Debian the other day,
> it appeared to me that the installer would insist on building a swap
> partition regardless of my memory size.
>
> I'm just wondering if anyone has some ideas on this topic.  Thanks.
> - -- 
> HolmesGrown Solutions
> The best solutions for the best price!
> http://holmesgrown.ld.net/
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