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. My rationale is that I like to have several large programs available without having to wait for them to load and initialize every time I want to change from one to the other. 2GB swap lets me have them all at once, with occasional page faults rather than out-of-memory errors. Of course, switching to a recently unused program generates lots of page faults, but the initialization is already there in the swap. Startup time is almost unnoticeable. The amount of swap space depends on how the system is going to be used as well as the amount of physical memory you have. The 2x was kind of a general rule of thumb that kind of went out the window with large memory systems. In your case, you have a need to allocate a large swap space since you want to leave a number of large programs resident. Most people today
On Sunday 24 July 2005 10:40 pm, John Perry wrote: probably don't need more that 512M. (I go back to the days when 1MB or RAM was considered a lot). But, when it is not unusual for a desktop system to have 1GB RAM with large (100GB+) hard drives, then allocating 2 or 3GB of swap is not excessive eventhough it is probably mostly wasted space. -- 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