hey,

i have a 500mb hd that i wanna use as a swap file on its own, and was wondering, does it help at all to have the swap file size a multiple of ur RAM? or is it just for neatness?

thanks,
James

Neither. It was a go by, back in the day. If you have less than 128, I suggest still using it as a go by. I am sure someone will disagree pretty quick though.

well i doubled my swap file.

e.g i have 384mb ram so my swap file is 768mb

Well you're listening to outdated and incorrect advice then. Just like Kelly Jones when someone said "Hey, You guy's should cover that wicked Rod Stewart song! The kids love him!"

Do you actually think you need that much? I would take it down to around 256 or less. Actually I have mine set at 32MB for Swap. I have 640MB RAM though.

What do you do that you think you will need that much?

no guys....there is no use in making your swap bigger than 128, cuz it's not going to be used all. I heard that for linux to use something bigger...you need to make multiple Swap partiitons of 128 megs about...and then Linux will work well with that...but for example I have 512 ram...and there is no where in hell I'm making a 1 gig swap partition....I just have 3 128's...and trust me...I don't think I've ever even used the first one,

zLinuxz

If you've got a spare 500mb drive then you might as well just use it for swap, it's not much good for anything else.

hehe...we say that now...the first computer I ever owned had 250 megs of hardisk space, running Windows 3.11 NT, WOW!!
and the second computer I owned 2 years later after this one was a MAJOR upgrade, heheh, 520 megs of hardisk, 12 megs of RAM!!!, damn!!!! back in 1991!!!!, a very AWESOME 256 colour video card!!! and the thing why my computer kicked so much ass was because I had it upgraded to 100 mhz and I had the awesomest Sound card, Sound Blaster 16 bit!! super powerful!! and I had two awesome speakers!!!....
I gave it away to some family mamember about 2 years ago...cuz I still had that computer, they upgraded it, and now it's plugged into a cable modem!! woa, a 10+ year old computer,
So trust me...you can do a lot with 500 megs, .

well...that wasn't completely true...the first computer I owned was a Comodore 64...hehhe, it took about 1 hour to load a game off of an audio tape!, how's that for technology, hehhe.

I've got slackware 8 installed on a spare box that only has a couple of 120mb hard drives....it has 256mb of ram and works well.....not much room to install software though

yes, I totally agree with you...now a days, software is so incredibly BIG!,