Swap Question

Ralph W. Reid rreid at sunset.net
Mon Jan 7 10:30:18 EST 2008


Depending on what you do with the system, there is still a chance that
some swapping might occur (a very slim chance at this point in time
perhaps).  On my big system (8 GB of RAM) I have a swap partition of 2
GB to catch any overflow--although I have no idea what I will do in
the near future which will actually use it.  If the `free' command
shows that I ever access swap memory, I will definitely be doing
something big.  If you do not expect to need any swapping but later
find that you do, you can always set up a swap file on an existing
partition to handle the situation, and then perhaps add another hard
drive for a more permanent swap partition if needed.  In any case,
setting up a swap partition as large as twice your system memory (4
GB) seems kind of large--how slow your system will be if you actually
start swapping several GB at a time...  How much swap space to
allocate has been debated for many years, and the decision comes down
to a slightly educated guess and your own judgement.

HTH, and have a great day.

On Mon, Jan 07, 2008 at 01:44:56AM -0700, Steve Holmes wrote:
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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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-- 
Ralph.  N6BNO.  Wisdom comes from central processing, not from I/O.
rreid at sunset.net  http://personalweb.sunset.net/~rreid
...passing through The City of Internet at the speed of light...
SECANT (x) = TAN (x) / COTAN (x)




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