Obligatory swap-space, how much?

Grife · 11-14-2007, 03:09 PM

Hi!

I have a new computer with 2Gb of RAM. That's as much as my 4 previous computers combined! Back in the days rule of the thumb was that amount of swap space to be allocated should be 2*RAM, in this case it would be 4Gb then. Seems a bit wasteful, considering the huge amount of RAM I already have, which should take burden off the HD operations afaik..

Couldn't I just live with the regular 1Gb I've always allocated or should I really use 4Gb to use as a swap?

forrestt · 11-14-2007, 03:25 PM

You really don't need any swap defined. It is insurance against running out of ram so your system doesn't crash. Here is a discussion on the topic:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...8/swap-545237/

pljvaldez · 11-14-2007, 03:26 PM

Usually I never go above 512MB of RAM in any system (even old ones). My system has 2GB RAM and never swaps, even when doing doing a lot of things at once.

I think the only time you need more is if you're going to do professional video editing or 3-D rendering, which sometimes requires a lot of RAM.

ggarron · 11-14-2007, 07:49 PM

With that amount of RAM you maybe do not need any swap, but for sure you have a big disk also, so if you are using a big_mem kernel you can use a swap of 1 or 2 Gigs, if anytime you go out of RAM (difficult) but if want to run two or three VM machines at the same time you will need that RAM and more, you may also create a Swap file.

http://www.go2linux.org/Swap-memory-...with-swap-file

here is a how to, that may help you.

hope I could help you anyway.

Guillermo Garron
Linux Operating System