Re: How much swap space is needed

[Kent Borg <kentborg-rhl borg org>]

On Sun, Jun 01, 2003 at 07:51:06PM -0600, Ryan McDougall wrote:
> In your case... Id probably set it to 512, or 1024 depending on how
> much disk space you can spare.

I was thinking about this more this afternoon.  I was imagining buying
a frugal but killer box.  Say I picked up a parts catelogue with the
intention of spending some money wisely.  What would I do?

I might buy this: their best dual CPU motherboard, a pair of the
fastest CPUs available (or second fastest?--sometimes the bleeding
edge costs too much for too little), as much RAM as it would accept
(say, 6 GB), a fast dual headed video card, 4 of those 300+ GB hard
drives arrayed in a software raid 0+1 giving me 600+ GB of fast disk
space.  Obviously throw in heatsinks, a case, et al.

How much swap would I give that?  It would depend upon what I was
doing.

If doing kernel compiles and general purpose web browsing I might give
it 2 GB--way less than my total RAM.  OK, maybe 4 GB.

If I wanted to do video (or HDTV) production (Linux is finally getting
there) and rotoscoping (retouching) I would try it with no swap and
see how it worked.  But say I wanted to start computing fancy 3-D
sequences, might big renderings want to work their way through big
datasets and benefit from a lot of swap?  Or would this benefit not
kick in until we get to 64-bit CPUs and their bigger address space?

I am starting to think that a single gigabyte of swap is pretty well
sized to the current Linux kernels.


-kb