swap space was: Re: slackware can't install

[Kenny Hitt]

Hi.
On Fri, Aug 24, 2007 at 06:27:42PM -0500, Adam Myrow wrote:
> On Fri, 24 Aug 2007, Jude DaShiell wrote:
> 
> This is a completely false statement, that for some reason gets propagated 
> over and over again.  From what I understand, the idea dates back to an 
> early version of BSD which would duplicate all of your RAM to swap space, 
> thus creating a redundant copy of RAM.  So, you had to have more swap than 
> ram in order to have any swap space at all.  The way Linux, and most other 
> operating systems do it is to append swap to RAM, so if you have 1GB of 
> RAM, and 2GB of swap, you effectively have 3GB of memory.  I have 1GB of 
> RAM on my system, and almost never use any swap space.  Of course, if I 
> ran Gnome, I might use some of it, but I doubt I'd come even close to 2GB.
> 


I do run Gnome full time.  This system also runs apache and exim4.  It takes over a day before the system starts to use any swap on this box with 1 gig of ram.  It warely uses 128 meg of swap.
After being up over 3 days 13 hours, I finally am using 128 meg.  I've been building a lot of source during the last 3 days.  free looks like:

total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       1003732     770820     232912          0      28036     291532
-/+ buffers/cache:     451252     552480
Swap:       489972     126468     363504

I should have set this box with less swap since it really isn't using it.

          Kenny