when i partitioned for my linux installation, i set aside almost 2 GB for a swap partition. it's about 3 times as large as the machine's physical RAM (about 640 MB).

i have never seen the swap space used. sometimes it says that a single megabyte of swap is being used, but other than that, it doesn't seem like it ever gets any use.

is there something wrong with this, or is it a good thing? if i'm not using my swap partition, can i get rid of it?

Yeah, I have 700MB of swap which is just what was left over. it's never been used by I've got 1.5GB of RAM so that's not really much of a suprise.I wouldn't be getting rid of it all but you could easily cut that down to tops 512MB if you wanted.

This is a good thing -- the less your swap partition is used, the better your performance will be, the reason being that access times within RAM are measured in nanoseconds, while access times from the hard drive (aka swap) are measured in milliseconds. That's 6 orders of magnitude. Yipes.

Personally, I'd say that as long as you have a reasonably modern PC (P3 equivalent or better, 256Mg RAM or better) then you're probably safe with a swap of 256Mg, regardless of the amount of RAM you have. In the past, there was a guideline that swap should be twice RAM, but that was in the days where having 64Mg RAM was considered leading edge. These days, RAM limitations are less of an issue, considering that the only time swap would even be called into use at all is when your RAM is pushed past capacity and your system is forced to write memory pages out to disk. If you've only got 32 or 64Mg of RAM that's not terribly hard to do, but if you've got 256Mg or more, it becomes increasingly unlikely.

As DJ P@ckman indicated, you may wish to consider reducing the size of your swap partition, but if your got disk space to burn, it's pretty much a non-issue. -- J.W.

ok... i want to shrink the swap partition and make my main partition bigger in its place. how do i do this without messing things up?