swap drive, physical memory
 

Should the swap drive be 3 times the size of the physical memory in a system?

That is what I read in a Linux book.

But I've heard people say that I'll never need more than 256MB swap drive.

Is the swap drive an image of the memory, or is it used as an extension to the memory?

as I understand it swap memory is like virtual memory in other os like mac and windows. 250 mb should be plenty. I think I have 150-200 right now.

The Swap space is an actual partition that's used sort of like a scratch disk. If you have alot of memory, you honestly probably don't even need one. I know I don't, but for Linux, I said ok, take 150Megs, which of course has never been used and sits as wasted harddrive space. 150-200 sounds good depending on your RAM as scotty says. Three times RAM though, YIKES, I would have a 1.5Gig swap partition of wasted space. :eek:

for those(like me) that don't want to even dedicate a swap drive goto freshmeat.net and get swapd, dynamically allocates swap chunks as you need them :)

Yeah, these docs were probably written when a computer with >32Mb of RAM was considered to be power machine. Even that Linux for Dummies (which was written only a couple of years ago) suggests SWAP=2xPhysical. I did have 512Mb (to be on the safe side), but since my gkrellm showed me that I wasn't every using any, I've down-sized to about 150Mb.

...that book (and other sources) also say you must append more than 64 megs of RAM, or linux won't "see" it, but I didn't find that to be the case with suse 6.whatever I had or RH 7.2

That may have been the case in older distributions, but today it seems that any distro will pick up your correct amount of RAM, barring any MB and BIOS hickups.