Hi evrybody

I have a question on swap partitioning .

1. what are the right size for swap : double ; the same ; as much as you want : more than one? My reason for asking this is because i sized my swap partition in different ways during many instalations and i realized that if you widen it for about 1Gb the system becomes very slow and instable(?). tell me if i'm wrong, please. Does slowliness have really something to do with swap size?

PS : Can i be disconnected from the net by someone on your site ? hacked (i mean)?

dunno about the hacked thing. I doubt it though.

General rule of thumb that I've heard is twice the amount of RAM. Anymore than that and your system will bog down...I have 196mbRAM and 380mb Swap. I tried it with more, but found I got diminishing returns (ie greater slow down the bigger the swap).

But then, if you're running 512 meg of RAM, then the chance of ever getting near a swap file a pretty small. well i've got 256, and my box has been up a few days, been compiling code etc, but i';ve onyl used 4meg of swap... 156mb currently doing sod all, could easily be used elsewhere.

Very true...I've got 512MB and the swap almost doesn't need to be there. But agree that one should even if a small 100 or something.

IT WORKED


Thanks alot people now i have just 512MB and things seem to work much faster.


PS I just installed MDRK 8.1 really nice i think i'll stick with it (gnome has lots of new stuff)

Here's another take on the whole swap issue, written by someone in a local LUG: (thanks Alan, if you read this)

Both Linux Weekly Newsletter and Kernel Traffic News have covered swap
requirements of recent kernels so to get the exact story consult those
references. IIRC, it was a strong recommendation that 2.4.x kernels with
the "Rik" VM demand should always have swap >= 2x RAM. With the AA VM used
in kernel 2.4.10 and beyond (but not ac kernels, yet, which still have the
"Rik" VM), I believe this recommendation is relaxed, but I don't know how
far. With virtual memory systems, there are no hard and fast rules. Thus,
running without swap or a small swap that violates the "rules" is certainly
possible, but you could run into trouble if you ever start too many jobs so
it is not recommended in general.

That's a good take. I think it comes down to preference though if you have enough RAM. If not then sure, swap away. Having 512M of ram and a swap of 115MB I have yet to even use the swap...So with newer higher performance machines it is debatable I think. But that's just my 2 pents...

i was taught from a linux guru a long time ago, when making your swap space, it was then you usually doubled your swap space according to your ram size, in those days most had usually 16 or 32 was common, now with most machines using 256 or more, there is no need to double your swap of your ram as it will never be used totally and your wasting hard drive space then.
so to make it short, there is never a need to usually go over 100 megs of space for swap, it should always work fine using 100 meg to 125 meg. anything more is just waste.