How much swap?, and .....

kato678 · 02-21-2002, 09:06 AM

Hi . Im new to Linux and am installing it to 5gigs of my 30gig HDD.
win98 on 1st partition and Redhat 7.2 on second. My question is
basically how much swap should I have? A webtutorial said minumum of "twice" your available RAM. Well I have 512MB. Do I have to waste over a GIG on swapspace?

Also what order Do I put the partitions?

boot
swap
/

or
boot
/
swap

thnks alot

acid_kewpie · 02-21-2002, 09:14 AM

the thing with twice-your-ram is an archaic rule of thumb goingn back to when you either had kids or bought some new ram... personally, i'd say you'd never need more than 100mb, but playing it safe, say about 200, and you'll not get near filling it all ever. as to the order, it's farily irrelevant, may as well stick the swap at the end of the drive tho.

Thymox · 02-21-2002, 09:15 AM

It shouldn't matter which order you put your partitions, but Windows normally prefers to be the 1st on the harddisk. As for swap, it seems that these tutorials were based on a time when 16Mb was a good amount of RAM. There is a thread somewhere around here (fairly recently) on how much SWAP is needed, but most peeps seem to be fairly happy with an equal amount of SWAP to their RAM (so in your case, this would be 512). Personally, I have chosen to have my SWAP=2xRAM (which, funnily enough, gives me 512Mb as well), but I don't have space constraints.

trickykid · 02-21-2002, 09:47 AM

to tell you the truth.. i always put my /boot first followed by the swap.. then all the rest in no particular order... that way if i do use my 100 meg swap, its at the beginning of the drive for faster access that the human eye wouldn't be able to detect the performance anyways..

hope that helps..

neo77777 · 02-21-2002, 11:58 PM

You can get away without swap at all if you plan to use you llinux box for use at home, nothing fancy like movie editing, and running tons of GUI apps at the same time.

finegan · 02-22-2002, 12:08 AM

I remember that the last time this came up, Dave Phillips (on of the mods), did a stress test at home to see if the 2/1 rule held true. He oppened enough photos in gimp, StarOffice, and other RAM pig apps to get RedHat to barf twice and choke out. I think he was running with something like 256Mb of swap on 512 RAM. If I remember right he repeated the same experiment on Slack and the X-server just choked and died.

I get by with 512Ram and something like 300Mb of swap and haven't noticed a problem; with RedHat, Slackware, LFS (hehe its fast!) and Mandrake.

Cheers,

Finegan