-----Original Message-----
From: "Carlos E. R."
The 03.09.02 at 11:23, Michael.James@csiro.au wrote:
I read somewhere that the 2.4 kernel works better with swap at least 2 times the physical ram.
Could be. I don't think there is a real, clear rule that specifies how much swap is needed; at least, I haven't seen it. If you have 1Gbyte of ram, you could get away with no swap at all, or very little - except if you use big databases, for example.
The rule on swap used to be 2x the amount of ram. That was when ram was VERY expensive. I remember paying $40 a meg for ram and swap was less expensive to use. With ram much less expensive to day people can afford more ram to run their PC, so the 2x rule is as criticle as it once was. Yes on systems running large databases you will still want to use a lot of swap just in case, but then if you start swapping you know it's time to buy more ram. When swap is used it will cause the system to run slower because of the added overhead of writing to the disk. It still does not hurt to have 2x for swap with disk drives being so cheap today who is going to miss 1 gig of disk space that is used for swap. Better to have swap and have the PC keep running then not have any swap and have the PC crash when it runns out of memory. Ken