I have a question about swap partition.

People always say to have it 1-2 times the amount of ram. That doesn't make sense to me really because the more ram you have the less swap you would need?? If you have 64MB of ram a 256+ MB swap would sound good. Thats 4 times, but if you have 512 MB of ram, you would only need a 256 MB swap at most, and it would probably never get touched so even 128 would be fine...so that would be 1/4-1/2 of ram.

Now in bac()ns case he has 384 MB now, plus he is getting another 256 MB, for a total of 640 MB....so why would he need to add more swap space like wildtiger23 suggested?

I have 256 MB ram and a 256 MB swap, my swap space never gets touched, here is free with a 3 day uptime.

Swap: 257032 1504 255528


I was just wondering about this....maybe linux uses more swap with the more ram you have but that doesn't make sense to me so i figured i would ask you people.

thanks

the 2 x ram thing is slightly outdated, if you have 256 or more of physical ram, a 256 swap is more than enough.

The 1-2 times RAM was back in the days when RAM was miniscule as compared to today.

I agree with you, and have been saying it for awhile. If you have more than 128MB of RAM, a 128MB swap will be rarely touched by the average user. When are you going to be opening something bigger than 128MB? If you are running a heavily-used server, or have large databases or some-other files, then you might need more.

Let's think about the extreme... A gig of RAM. Are you going to need a 3GB swap?