On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 1:33 PM, Johan Grönqvist <johan.gronqv...@gmail.com>wrote:
> 2012-05-02 13:12, Sian Mountbatten skrev: > > Your swap partition is, very likely, too large. As a rule, your swap >> partition should be the same size as your RAM. Do you have 40GB RAM? >> > > Linux can handle well above 40 GB of swap. I would be surprised if "swap > partition too large" was the reason. My swap is larger than that. > > I am always a bot surprised by advice like the ones in this thread. I have > heard and seen this many times. > > I am aware that for web-browsing, and other similar activities, using swap > is almost always bad, as it slows the system down. > > I typically run programs and scripts without having a good estimate of > their future memory usage, and my computer usage is frequently RAM-bound, > so I try to guess how much I can do within the memory I have available. > > It is not uncommon for me to misjudge the need by a factor of 2 or 3, and > in those cases, I have programs being killed left and right unless I have > enough swap-space. > > I would say that being careful with swap-space is important when one has > too small a hard drive, but I have plenty of drives space these days. Not > having my jobs killed is more important to me than saving a few tens of GB > of extra space. > > I have just above 40 GB on my current desktop, and when I had influence > over a computer with 64GB RAM, it had quite a bit of swap space. > > Mem: 64558M total, 24822M used, 39735M free, 324M buffers > Swap: 184323M total, 25M used, 184298M free, 24238M cached > > Regards > > Johan > > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to > debian-user-REQUEST@lists.**debian.org<debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org>with > a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact > listmas...@lists.debian.org > Archive: > http://lists.debian.org/**jns26c$n9e$1...@dough.gmane.org<http://lists.debian.org/jns26c$n9e$1...@dough.gmane.org> > > The only time I have seen swap not used when it is active is when it wasn't needed. If you can see your swap active using the free command or swapon -s , and it's not getting used, but you keep crashing, what I usually see is bad memory. From my experience memtest would be my next step. Shane
