On Tue, 9 Jul 2002, Erik Trulsson wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 08, 2002 at 09:30:04PM -0400, Chuck Robey wrote:
> > Nowadays, what with the price of fast memory at such low levels, I'm
> > buying more memory than I really need, just because it's *so* cheap, the
> > price has gone up before, and it's possible (maybe likely) that next
> > year's popular new app will need the memory.  I'm probably not alone in
> > doing this.  It's causing me to wonder about how much swap to allocate.
> >
> > I used to follow the rule that I dedicate twice as much disk memory to
> > swap as I have RAM.  Now, with my new system, I'm getting a gig of RAM,
> > but it seems ridiculous to dedicate 2G of disk to swap.  Under these
> > conditions, what's the real bottom limit (if you have one gig of RAM) for
> > how much swap you can get away with?  One Gig?  Less?
>
> Minimal amount of swap possible:  No swap at all of course.
> Minimal swap if you want to be able to catch core dumps: Physical RAM
> size + 64K
> Minimal amount of swap you need:  Depends on what you are doing,
> doesn't it?
>
>
> You don't need to configure any swap at all if you think your RAM is
> going to be large enough for everything you do.
>
> OTOH, considering how cheap disk space is these days, why worry about a
> gigabyte or two?  Some day you might be running some extremly memory
> hungry application(s) and then you might neeed that extra swap.
> Running out of swap is No Fun, and should be avoided if practical.
>
> Personally, in your situation I would probably configure enough swap to
> be able to catch a core dump and not much more, i.e. slightly more than
> 1G swap.

Probably a good compromise, it just feels silly to go for a G of swap when
I will probably never use more than 256M (and that not very often).  I
mostly compile, edit, and web-browse.  Thanks for the confirmation (I
suspected this answer, but I feel better now about it).

>
>
>

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Chuck Robey         | Interests include C & Java programming, FreeBSD,
[EMAIL PROTECTED]   | electronics, communications, and signal processing.

New Year's Resolution:  I will not sphroxify gullible people into looking up
fictitious words in the dictionary.
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