How Big Should My Swap Partition Be? 900
For the last 10 years, I have been asking people more knowledgeable than I, "How big should my swap be?" and the answer has always been "Just set it to twice your RAM and forget about it." In the old days, it wasn't much to think about — 128 megs of RAM means 256 megs of swap. Now that I have 4 gigs of RAM in my laptop, I find myself wondering, "Is 8 gigs of swap really necessary?" How much swap does the average desktop user really need? Does the whole "twice your RAM" rule still apply? If so, for how much longer will it likely apply? Or will it always apply? Or have I been consistently misinformed over the last 10 years?
Re:What Has Changed? (Score:2, Funny)
640k is enough...
in Soviet Russia drive partitions you.
How big? (Score:2, Funny)
42 Petabytes for Vista, the next version, who knows.
The page file system needs to be able to juggle the
fake RAM sizes effectively, So petabytes seems to fit the bill.
Re:Which OS? (Score:2, Funny)
How many Windows users do you know with a swap partition?
Re:What Has Changed? (Score:5, Funny)
I hate it when that happens. A helpful popup told me I ran out of CPU cycles just a few days ago, and I had to order a whole bunch online. Cost thousands! Still waiting for them to arrive.
Re:Errr... check your math. (Score:5, Funny)
It's "Verizon math"...
Just my 0.02 cents worth.
8GB of swap is useful (Score:3, Funny)
It lets you leak more memory for longer, this is a necessary feature for running modern software.
Re:separate partitions for / and /home (Score:2, Funny)
Re:What Has Changed? (Score:5, Funny)
"Some people actually want to debug something and find out *why* windows crashed."
It crashed because they booted it. Next.
Re:Run multple instances ;)Re:Definitely not twice (Score:1, Funny)
The system is giving the program all that memory - to give nothing in return would be rude. That is why you should return 1 instead of 0.
Re: four different versions of Linux on my laptop (Score:2, Funny)
It's not the size of the swap space (Score:3, Funny)
that matters. It's how you use it....
Re:What Has Changed? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What Has Changed? (Score:4, Funny)
"Enough ram for file caching" is approximately infinite RAM
You know what I love? I love how you're not afraid to say something unbelievably stupid without irony. You should run for President.
Cool Performance Tip (Score:5, Funny)
Why does everyone put their swap on a slow harddrive ? A Gentoo running mate of mine in the pub showed me how to map the swap file into RAM: runs much faster there.
(Although suspend does not seem to work now :-(