The 03.09.02 at 17:57, Ken Schneider wrote:
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
I remember first seeing that rule when I used windows 3.x. In fact, if you tried to use more that that it would warn you that it was useless, the OS would only use double the RAM. On later days, perhaps for W95, it would reserve half the bigger block on the HD. But, in Linux, I have a system with 32 Mb RAM, and well over 600 mbytes swap, perhaps a gigabyte... and it runs fine. Other people have none, and it works. So, the double rule is useless for Linux. It is way more complicated than that. So, I just recommend "as much as you need".
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.
Of course. And, anyway, even if RAM is cheap, HD is cheaper. Only if you repeatedly use big memory hungry programs it makes sense to buy an extra gigabyte :-) -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson