Re: Swap partition size (future proofing)

From: Paul Howarth (paul_at_city-fan.org)
Date: 02/01/05

  • Next message: Dan Trainor: "Re: core 3 hangs" 
    To: or users of Fedora Core releases <fedora-list@redhat.com>
Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2005 08:50:08 +0000

    On Tue, 2005-02-01 at 08:22 +0000, David Fletcher wrote:
    > I've just ordered the parts to build a new PC :)
    >
    > The motherboard (Intel D865PERL) has four memory module sockets which can take
    > a total of 4G RAM.
    >
    > I have ordered a single 1G memory module, leaving me plenty of scope to expand
    > the memory later if I want to.
    >
    > Searching the Fedora List archive, I found various suggestions for
    > increasing swap space by either adding a partion if there is unused space on
    > the HDD or using mkswap to create a swap file in an existing partition. Hard
    > drive space is fairly cheap these days so I want to set it up "right first
    > time" so that I don't have to mess about if (when) I add more memory later.
    >
    > Suggested swap partition sizes from the archives range from the same size as
    > the RAM to twice the size of the RAM.
    >
    > Given that I'm going to start with 1G of RAM, but could (but maybe won't) end
    > up with 4G of RAM, I'm thinking that maybe 6G would be a sensible size for
    > the swap partition.
    >
    > What do the members think?

    It depends entirely on what you intend to do with this machine. If it's
    a regular desktop machine and you've got 1G of RAM, you probably don't
    need any swap at all. If you're going to be doing work with large
    databases or other memory-intensive applications, you might need lots of
    swap, but remember that performance is going to go downhill as soon as
    you start actually using the swap space.

    Back in the "old days", a good rule of thumb was to use twice as much
    swap space as you had RAM. I suspect that's where you got the 6GB figure
    from. But really it's case of how much memory, both real and virtual,
    that your applications are going to use that should be the deciding
    factor, not the amount of actual RAM in your system.

    Having a big swap partition won't do any harm, so if you have lots of
    disk space there's no harm in having a big swap partition, you just may
    not see the benefit of it. If you have more than one disk, try splitting
    the swap space amongst the disks as that's likely to give better
    performance.

    Paul. 

    -- 
Paul Howarth <paul@city-fan.org>
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