The Sunday 2005-07-24 at 22:40 -0400, John Perry wrote:
Ah. I was wondering about that, since I've read both truisms. For my own part, I've never been able to understand the rationale for the 2X truism, so I've done my own thing, which is 768MB RAM, 2GB swap partition.
I don't have time to answer today, so I'll just write a brief comment: Windows was limited to 2X, that was the absolute maximum. At least, that was so in win 3, and probably 95. That's the origin of that "rule of thumb". Linux is not so limited, you can add as much as you need (till the kernel complains, of course).
For example, I have a system with 32Mb RAM and around 1 GB swap. I will not deny it is slow, but can't do anything else. Actually, in Windows95 and forward swap was somewhat automatic. In Windows, SWAP was (and is) a file in the file system. I'm pretty sure the 2x (or 3x) rule of thumb is of Unix origin since we've been allocating swaps on Unix for quite a while before Windows knew what virtual memory was. At one time,
On Monday 25 July 2005 2:49 pm, Carlos E. R. wrote: the Linux swap was limited to something like 768M, and you could not allocate more, but that was fixed long before the 2.2 kernel. -- Jerry Feldman <gaf@blu.org> Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9