Re: How do I determine appropriate swapspace settings? And other partitioning questions.

From: Paul Sherwin (paulSPAM_at_paulsherwin.co.uk)
Date: 02/09/05 

Date: Wed, 09 Feb 2005 14:54:56 GMT

On Tue, 8 Feb 2005 17:28:04 -0800, Sir Jackery <root@jackery.com>
wrote:

>I agree, except you left out that X and its applications use huge amounts
>of memory. All of my servers each have a 128m swap partition and run with
>about 256-512m RAM. They NEVER swap, but there is no point in not having a
>health size swap partition because it is very easy to reclaim the space.
>With the cost of hdd space these days, why not allocate a 512m swap
>partition? It could come in handy in the future. If your computer starts
>to use it, do what morningdew says and add more memory. If your system is
>steadily using your swap it will bottleneck systems performance
>substantially.

Sure, it's a false economy to run with no swap at all, given the cost
of HD space. I think 256-512 RAM is pretty typical for a current Linux
desktop machine and they won't swap much even running big X desktops.
I usually configure 128m and keep an eye on things for the first few
hours. I've never had to add more swap yet :-)

You'll soon notice if your system is hitting the swap partition hard -
it'll run like a dog.

Best regards, Paul 

--
Paul Sherwin Consulting     http://paulsherwin.co.uk

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