I'm overhauling my machine and upgrading from ram from 256 to 512. With the possibility of 1gb in the future. My current swap partition is 500mb. I know the swap is generally double the ram, would there be a noticible performance difference if I stretch it out a little more?

No - the swap partition is only really important if you have low RAM. With your present (and projected) size, the swap partition is fine as it is.

Incidentally, this isn't really a Success Story, it belongs in Hardware or similar.

Moved: Not a Success Story. Seems suitable in Newbie as this is a very common question which could have been found with a simple search. Regards.

And to add to XavierP's answer, you most likely won't see any improvement in performance either, as most of the time you don't even want swap to be used. When swap is not being used, that means your RAM is doing its job properly.

I thought that swap is used even when the ram is not completely utilised because,
linux only uses the ram for processes that are running constantly and if the process or application has been inactive for some time then it is shifted to the swap so that the ram is free for important processes.

No that is not totally true. I learned even in a server envrionment if swap is ever used, you need more RAM...

Thanks for making that clear trickykid

I did search, all posts pertaining to swap partitions are questions about size for new installs. Been there done that, my question as you saw was whether to resize due to ram upgrade. As you know searching doesn't help that much thanks to the idiots that name there threads "OH KNOW: or "WHAT NOW!"I can't search all text of every post and reply If you can't find an answer within a page or too the search was useless. As far as the post being in succccess storys...beats me i was on like 10 min. sleeep, lucky i didn't fall on the keyboard and post "difhferhgt9432h9th34ohg43t43"

I would think with the explanations that most will give also on these new install questions pertaining swap, you would have come to the conclusion you wouldn't need to resize your swap or if you did, you could downsize it even since you were actually upgrading your RAM, not downgrading it...

Cheers.

lmao. sorry trickykid but he has a point and it's funny as hell to boot

But the search function doesn't have to search the thread titles. I believe that the default is to search the body of the posts and so renders the objections irrelevant.

I just ran a search for "swap partition size" (minus the quotes) and came up with 260 results. Going by the criteria established by Snatale1 (that of only looking in the first 2 pages) I found 4 references in the first 10 posts to having the swap partition be twice the size of your ram.

After the search, the question could have been "I am about to upgrade my swap partition to 1gb. Searches on LQ have brought up results suggesting that twice the size of my ram is a good swap partition size. I think 2gb of swap is a little excessive. Can anyone advise me on whether I need to expand my current 500mb partition?"

At the same time, being unwilling to read the text of the search results is a bit of a failing. Often the solution to a problem isn't found until 2 pages of posting. If you go to a library, you don't complain that the answers you seek aren't found by reading the book titles, do you?