I just have a question about the swap partion. I understand pretty much what it does I think. What I don't understand is about the size. Is bigger better? or is there a size depending on the hard drive that works best?
Any insight on this would be very helpful.
Thanks

Workstation = 100 to 200 MB in size will do you fine if you have over 128 MB of RAM.

Server = 200 MB or more, especially if you intend to have lots of users on the machine.

This is asked and discussed all the time, a search will bring up many results.

A sub-question: Is it possible to mount a swap partition and take a peek at whats in it? Just out of curiosity.
Thanks
-NSKL

The question of swap size is a difficult one to answer. On a personal workstation, you shouldn't need too much unless you are doing some really intensive image manipulations or math calculations. On servers, you could end up with with some pretty large swap partitions, especially if it's a database server. You basically have to know how your application behaves.

And yes, it is possible under the right circumstances to search through swap space and see what's there.

I have heard of as much as 1gig of swap space, is too much bad? Do I under stand swap that if you more users you have connected the more swap you need? How does swap differ from ram then?

As was stated earlier, it depends. For a workstation setup (basically one/two users logged on at a time), a total of 250-300MB of RAM and swap is usually quite enough. For a server with lots of simultaneous usage may need 1 GB swap partition. A swap partition is a form of virtual memory. Because it resides on a drive, it is slower than physical RAM. Linux tries to make as much use of available RAM as possible, including using it for cache processes. It will spill over to a swap partition as needed, but understands the speed limitations of swap. Linux does manage memory resources very well.

That what I thought. Thank you for answering my question. It is small things like that sometimes you can never figure out unless you ask some one.

Thanks again
Kevin