Questions re swap and hibernate interaction on 8 gig machine

[Christopher Browne]

On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 6:06 PM, Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>  I have 8 gigs of ram on my new sytem (will obviously be 64-bit Gentoo)
> and I want to know how much swap I need.  The general rule of thumb is
> twice the ram.  In this case, it would be 16 gigs.  I think that it may
> not need swap when up, unless I do some heavy duty stuff.  My main
> concern about a swap partition is how much I need for hibernate-to-disk
> to work.  Is there a rule about this, or should I simply allocate 16
> gigs out of my terabyte drive, and play it safe?

On Linux, these days, the value shouldn't be very important.  If you
don't expect to want to swap, it wouldn't be unreasonable to have NO
swap.

There have been times on varying versions of Unix where 2x or more
swap was *required*, and I recall there being a bug on Linux at one
time that required you to have a quantity of swap resembling 2x RAM.

But old requirements on other operating systems, and bugs on elderly
versions of Linux, should not be treated as binding requirements here,
today.

I'd think a main reason to want to have a lot of swap would be if you
wanted to have a rather large tempfs filesystem.   But the data's
liable to get lost upon rebooting anyways, so there's nothing
mandatory there, either.

The "need backing store" requirements of yesteryear don't exist
anymore, so there's no strong reason from an "oh, the system REALLY
needs it!" perspective to require *any* swap.
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