swap
 

Helo all,
so please could any tell me. what swap is used for when I installing linux, and how much space should I have for it>?
thanks

Swap is physical memory space -- generally a partition devoted to 'overflow' memory, if that makes sense.

Generally 2x your physical RAM is recommended, unless you have more than 2gb iirc

You make the swap as big as you need. Of course knowing what you need is the hard bit. 500meg to a gig is a safe bet. If you have 1-2 gig of ram you will rarely need swap. It's just there for when you run short of ram. I run 500meg ram at the moment, and 500-1gig of swap depending on my needs at the time. (currently 1gig which is rarely used)

swap
 

what do u mean by iir

Swap is similar to pagefile in windows, and genearlly required by systems with less memory. I personally feel that if you are not running a server & using Linux only for desktop use only & you have 512MB or more RAM, then swap is not really necessary.

Even with 512MB of RAM swap maybe useful as a desktop user. Try running Firefox, Openoffice.org, nautilus and azureus at the same time, you will find that they use a lot of ram and if you don't have swap, the system gets very sluggish.

512 meg here and I certainly use swap once I'm running all the apps I use on a big day... I'm using 100meg of swap right mow and only have kmail, knode, firefox, OOo2, opera, a few terms and little apps running...

Twice the size of RAM should do it.

"Chips are cheap," so buy plenty of them.