I've never had any problems with the swap file but I notice today that it says I have 128 MB of swap space total. Thats odd, because I allocated 509 MB under System Commander, in fact I just went out, deleted the partition, recreated it and reformatted it and still it says I have only 128 MB of swap total.

Is this normal ?

I'm not experiencing any problems but word is on the street that I should have 512MB x 2 = 1024 MB / G of swap allocated so whats the deal...

(Just call me the winer!)

Or should I try to recreate it while running Mandrake? Something tells me you can't really do it like that...

- Perry

How are you checking swap size? Try running the following in a console:

$ free

That will print out your memory usage and has a separate line for swap. Also check the partition size in Mandrake Control Center>Mount Points.

As for total swap size, the old 2x ram formula has little relevance with todays high memory configurations. It depends on what you do, but for normal use, the I think a better rule would be 2x ram, but not greater than 500MB of swap. And at that, with 512MB of ram you'll rarely go into swap which is good; ram is much faster.

thanks for the post, i couldn't figure out what all this fuss was about with the swap when i hardly ever saw activity on it

however thanks again for $ free instruction, i was using /usr/bin/gnome-system-monitor and gkrellm.

best theory i had was maybe -nested logins might have had something to do with it

- perry