new memory = more swap?

[Rick Stevens]

Kevin Krieser wrote:
> I have 1 GB RAM on my Linux box, and 2 GB swap (0 of which is used).
> But with 260GB of disk space on the computer, why not?  I may want to
> run a program that uses 2 GB sometime.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com
> [mailto:fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Matt Morgan
> Sent: Thursday, March 25, 2004 1:09 PM
> To: For users of Fedora Core releases
> Subject: Re: new memory = more swap?
> 
> 
> On 03/25/2004 01:50 PM, John Thompson wrote:
> 
> 
>>Craig Thomas wrote:
>>
>>
>>>I have 256MB ram and a 502MB swap, and want to increase to 384MB ram, 
>>>[i know, i know it's an old machine].  I've read in the RH manual and 
>>>else where that double the amount of ram is "right".  If I want more 
>>>swap but don't have any unpartitioned space left, what are my options?
> 
> 
>>>(I do, however, have lots of free space on my drive).
>>>   
>>>
>>
>>The advice that swap=2(RAM) dates from the time when RAM was expensive 
>>and few user machines had more than 64MB.
>>
>>These days most people have plenty of RAM and thus require less swap 
>>space.  I have 384MB RAM and a 256MB swap partition that is seldom more
> 
> than 25% used.
> 
>> 
>>
> 
> Is it still also true, though, that swap should at a minimum = RAM (this
> 
> is knowledge that dates back to early versions of SCO, which was weird 
> anyway, I know)? If so, then having more swap than RAM may be worthwhile
> 
> anyway, because you probably have plenty of disk space, and you might 
> add RAM later (and you won't have to repartition at that point if you 
> have extra swap).
> 
> I realize it's also a lot easier to repartition these days, too. But I 
> still like to avoid it.
> 
> Can you have too much swap? (Disk space issues aside). If I have 512 Mb 
> of RAM, and set up a 1Gb swap partition, did I make a mistake?

I don't think so.  The old ROT (rule-of-thumb) was to set up swap to be
twice your system RAM, but it was subject to all kinds of tweaks.  With
RAM being fairly cheap now, it's not so necessary.  However, if your
system starts to use swap a lot, then it's time to buy more RAM. Once
it starts swapping, your system will slow to a crawl.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
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