[PLUG] Ideal Swap partition size

["शंतनु महाजन (Shantanoo Mahajan)"]

On 20-Mar-08, at 1:42 PM, Devendra Laulkar wrote:

> Hi,
>
>>> I would like to know the ideal swap partition size for new
>>> computers which
>>> typically come with > 1 Gigs of RAM.
>>
>> ideal is no swap - swap slows things down, and with gigs of RAM you
>> dont need swap. But keep a 500 MB swap space handy for those rare
>> occasions when you may need swap - and keep swap turned off.
>
> Problem with no swap is that, when you do run out of RAM on a rainy  
> day,
> your computer just locks up for some time and an application gets  
> killed
> of to make space. Having swap space makes the computer slow down,  
> but it
> gives some time to investigate.
>
> The problem with having more than a 1 GB of swap space is from new  
> users
> perspective. New users think that this is a "waste" of space, as you
> cannot store any data on the swap partition.


How about having loopback mounted file to be used as swap instead of  
whole
partition? This way you can increase/decrease the swap size. You can  
have
multiple swaps. And since swap will be used occasionally, it may not  
have
much impact on performance in desktop environment in most of the cases.

regards,
shantanoo