On Thursday, July 28, 2005 @ 4:28 AM, Ken Schneider wrote:
On Thu, 2005-07-28 at 03:47 +0200, Carlos E. R. wrote:
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The Monday 2005-07-25 at 15:01 -0400, Jerry Feldman wrote:
Actually, in Windows95 and forward swap was somewhat automatic. In Windows, SWAP was (and is) a file in the file system.
That's the same as it was in Win 3.1. It was a file, it could be fixed or
automatic. Same thing :-)
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.
Yes, of course, I only said that the 2X rule was a windows thing, not that wirtual memory was a windows thing. It was not possible to allocate more:
if you did, it warned you that it would not use it.
I was first exposed to unix (SUN OS) in 1987 and (as far as I can remember) I was told that swap was generally 2X the amount of memory. SUN OS was clearly around before windows was. Windows 1.0 was released in 1985.
At one time, 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.
Right. And no so long ago, there was a limit per swap partition or file,
I
think it was 128 Mb. But you could allocate dozens of those spaces.
Ken Windows XP will not let you allocate a swap file (pagefile.sys) that is greater than 1.5 times your RAM. Not sure if that is pertinent to Linux, but I just wanted to point it out. I personally use the 1.5 number and, if you let Linux compute the size of your swap space, at installation, it wants to allocate roughly that amount, though it seems to be just a little bit less than 1.5 times RAM. Greg Wallace