Hello,

I've added some RAM to my original 64Mb RAM which was rather low. I have a Pentium II, 400MHZ. Swap size is 132Mb.

I tried a 128Mb stick and it worked fine alongside the 64Mb stick. So I thought 256Mb might be even better, as the man in the shop told me but the system seems less snappy -- especially surfing is slower (dial-up connection). I tried removing the 64Mb stick but no change.

- So could it be a question that the swap partition is too small? (I read a thread about 1 Gb RAM but i'm far from that.)

- Or simply that the system doesn't like that much RAM?

- Finally if I go back to 128Mb do I have to create a bigger swap partition (bigger than 132MB?). Does the RAMx2 principle still hold?

Many thanks for your help!

Your assumption is correct. RAM x 2 is the principle I usually stick to, for swap space.
Hope it helps.

Well, in Debian, i also have 128mb ra,m and 2GB of swap. The system wrks like a rocket...

I don't think the principle of making your swap space twice the size of your ram is sound. If you have very little ram, then you could benefit from having as much swap space as possible particularly if you want to run GNOME or KDE.

Well from what I've read and what I can read on this thread, you never need more than 512MB RAM, but then according to NCC-1701&NCC-1701-D a huge Swap works great. (other factors may be important too!)

Now would you call 256MB small RAM? (to me it's big enough but that's because I had 64MB which is definitely small RAM).

I don't use KDE nor Gnome at the moment only Fluxbox or IceWM.

Well I suppose the best thing to do would be to reinstall Libranet or install a new distro alongside it with a bigger Swap partition and compare -- I have a very few GB occupied by idle windoze98 which I could use.

Though the computer specs say the system can deal with up to 512MB RAM, my feeling is that 128MB is quite enough.

I think the 2x rule makes no sense. Say you had only (for example) 16mb. 2x16 -> 32mb of swap, 32 + 16 -> 48mb of memory total. That would not be enough to run KDE . However if there were 128mb of swap (144 total) it would be possible (yes, very slow, but it is just an example). The point is you should look at how much ram you need total, try to fulfill that reqirement with as much real ram as you can afford, and make up for the rest with swap. For me with IceWM + bunch of big apps I need 300mb. So if i could only get 256mb of real ram then i would make a 100mb swap, adding some extra just in case.

I always wondered. I have almost 1 gig of ram, do I need a swap disk? I don't feel like wasting 2 gigs on one. I now have a 128 MB swap disk (I don't know why I pulled that number out of my ass).

I am not certain about this, but if your memory's speed in the 128mb is slower than the 64mb. Could that account for the slow down?

E.g. I understand that if you mix a 133mhz with 100mhz then, if it runs at all, it will run at the slower rate of 100mhz. Not sure you would see much noticable slowdown though.

Yes you do according to a thread , but not more than 512MB some people say.

Thank you for your suggestions folks!

I tried making my swap partition larger and it's no better. I'll see if I can get back the 128MB stick that worked fine -- it worked fine with the old PC100 64MB stick, too.

Cheers,

I would like to point out that swap has nothing to do with speed. It is for the rare occasion of there not being enough memory. More swap != more speed. More swap == keeping applications from closing abruptly when there's not enough memory. I have 768mb ram, and I don't have any swap at all since memory usage rarely goes past half of that. Of course 256 will need some swap, but the 2x rule is overkill and people who have >=512 usually don't need any at all.

Unless you want to print an extremely large tiff file on a A4 paper. This used up almost 1 Gb in swap for me. In short, monitor your RAM usage with the command "free" and try to find out how much swap is used over time.

Swap size depends on personal usage of the machine. There are no rules for it.