Swap Space

Flossie · 03-11-2004, 08:09 AM

I'm about to add a new hard drive to my Linux machine and have a question regarding SWAP Space.

Someone suggested that I have at least 10% of my hard Disk space as Swap space.

If I have 2 hard drives does this mean that I should have swap space of 10% on each of them or can I get away with having all the swap space situated on one drive but inculding the second drive in the total when calculating 10%.

I hope this makes sence. Think i'm making it more confusing than it really is

Thank you

Flossie

dopefish · 03-11-2004, 08:32 AM

You do not need to use 10% of your disk space as swap. I have 120g's and 256mb ram and only use 165mb swap, and that never gets full. Most people suggest using twice the amount of ram you have for swap space but that is not needed with newer systems having more ram.

Flossie · 03-11-2004, 08:40 AM

I''ll give that a try and see how I get on.

Thanks

Flossie

KidMW14 · 03-11-2004, 11:25 AM

It depends what you need between OS's. If you need to share presentations or large amounts of music, you'll probably want at least 10GBs of swap space. Otherwise, you could just go with a small amount. It really depends on what you're swapping.

dopefish · 03-12-2004, 04:48 AM

Swap space is allocated to running programs when ram is needed for another program. Sharing large presentations or large amounts of music is not going to be affected by swap space. Unless perhaps your sharing them with 100's of people at a time. Who the hell uses 10gigs of swap???

michaelk · 03-12-2004, 07:20 AM

Swap space should be determined by the applications you are running and the amount of installed RAM. Not by the total hard drive space.

Not knowing the above I would suggest 512mb as a good number.