Uwe Thiem <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > There are too damn many myths about swap out there. Like this one: > Always configure twice as much swap as you have ram. Why?
<OT> Well, it depends on how swap is handled by system. In linux, your total memory = physical memory + swap (as you wrote) A couple years ago I got answer from HP, where they said with hp-ux: total memory = physical memory + (swap - physical memory) only if swap > physical memory ! and total memory = physical memory if swap < physical memory (in other words, it was completely useless to have swap < phys.memory, and optimum was really swap = 2 * physical memory) They explained to me, that hp-ux 11 (or at least that early version) allocates part of swap of the same size as physical memory and mirrors the whole image of ram into swap for performance reasons: when more memory is needed, it can be immediatelly made free, because it is already paged to disk. So when I had 1GB RAM and 2GB swap, even right after system boot-up only 1GB of swap were free (in the other half of swap there was already mirror of physical memory), and I could not start any process which needed more than 2GB total memory. It seemed to me to be a complete vaste, and I was really angry, because it was time when 4 GB disk was a luxury (and e.g. irix did not have this strange "feature"). But things might have changed since then... </OT> Jarry -- Telefonieren Sie schon oder sparen Sie noch? NEU: GMX Phone_Flat http://www.gmx.net/de/go/telefonie -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
