[PLUG] regarging swap space

[Pranav Peshwe]

On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 10:35 AM, vinayak kulkarni <
kulkarnivd2007 at yahoo.co.in> wrote:

> hi all,
>
> it is said that 'swap space' should be double of physical memory(by
> respected authors)
> if it is not so, does it affect the performance of OS
>

Hi Vinayak,
   Although this is the prevalent opinion, IMO you need not have swap double
the RAM if you have something like 2+GB RAM. I doubt whether all that swap
will really be used for an average user (running openoffice, watching
movies, playing music, browsing web, email software).

(ignore if you already know) Swap is intended only as a fall back during
exceptional situations when the system runs low on RAM. If you plan to use
applications which regularly will need more memory than the amount of RAM
you have (like heavy video processing or running virtual machines) only then
will your swap be put to use.  However, using swap heavily will slow down
the system. In such cases it would be recommended to add more RAM.
Most of the times swap is not used at all.

Thus, linux will not run slower merely because you have swap less than
double the RAM.

AFAIK, the 'swap should be double the RAM' aphorism comes from the days when
RAM sizes were much less 1 GB.
Of course, if you have a important server, it does not hurt to spare 7-8 GBs
for a large swap. Doesn't hurt on a workstation with hundreds of GB
diskspace as well, but one always tries to optimize... :)

HTH.

- P


>
> thanks
> Vinayak D Kulkarni
> Navi Mumbai
> (Pune)
>
>
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