I know generally twice the size of your RAM is recommended for swap but for 1GB of RAM is 2GB swap really necessary?

My other question regarding splitting the swap space to 2 disk. I've read this improves performance. Do these two partitions have to be the same size? Also, to have linux write to these swap partitions in a parallel manner, would the lines in /etc/fstab look like the following:

/dev/hda2 swap swap defaults,pri=3 0 0
/dev/hdb2 swap swap defaults,pri=3 0 0


A doc I've read uses 'sw' rather than 'defaults' so I am wondering which is better. Thanks.

from what i know you can't software RAID a swap partition. (that is basically what you are asking to do)

having two swap partitions on seperate drives will not give you a noticeable speed improvement, unless your system load is maxed out.

Setting them to have the same priority level does basically give the swap partitions RAID like behavior. But no you aren't actually creating a software RAID partition.

i have a linux server in production with 1gb of ram and a 2gb page file, it has a mail server, fily/print with samba, and a web server connected to mysql. the most page usage i have seen is during my backups at 20% normal usage is around 5%

Honestly I can't answer you authoritatively but I can refer you to Debian's installation manual:

http://www.debian.org/releases/stabl...g.en.html#s6.4

Thanks to the Debian team!