How much swap?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Oct 25, 2006 at 09:57:30AM -0400, Giles Orr wrote:
> There's this old story that swap space should be equal to twice your
> RAM, and I've heard it for more than a decade of working with Unix.
> But I've never seen a satisfactory explanation (or any explanation at
> all) of why this should be so.  I have this bizarre idea that the more
> RAM you have the less swap you need, and that a person with 4Gb of RAM
> *doesn't* need 8Gb of swap.
> 
> Obviously this will be dependent on application: a person who expects
> to be manipulating multi-layer 24"x36" images in the GIMP might
> consider 12Gb of virtual memory merely adequate, and servers will have
> other considerations.
> 
> Can anyone explain the whole swap=2xRAM thing to me?  Thanks.

Well I certainly aim for not usually needing swap.  Of course some
people now believe in suspending PCs, which uses swap so for that task
you need at least as much swap as ram, preferably a bit more.  If you
have less, it simply can't suspend.

Personally I have no idea why I would want to shut down my machine at
all. :)

--
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists