Swap space

[Christopher Browne]

On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 7:48 PM, Jason Carson <jason-HjkH5KTEMfuEjziKL+yzSg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> I know the conventional wisdom with respect to swap space has always been
> to double your memory but I am about to build a system with 4 GB of
> memory. Do I really need an 8 GB swap space?

Almost certainly not.

 The "2x memory" rule applied to certain versions of BSD derived from
BSD 4.3, such as Ultrix, where the way they handled virtual memory
required that there be 2x as much swap space as physical memory in
order to be able to have virtual memory covering all of the physical
memory.  It may have applied to some versions of SunOS, too.

There was a brief time where Linux had a bug that made it require you
to have 1x RAM as swap space, but that was quite a serious bug, fixed
a very long time ago.

"Conventional wisdom" isn't valid.

Here's a pretty good policy for defining amount of swap:
http://tldp.org/LDP/sag/html/swap-allocation.html
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