Re: Regarding the SWAP size

[Jim Bauer <jfbauer@xxxxxxx>]

On Thursday 03 February 2005 06:09, Ajith wrote:
> Hi all,
> A small doubt ..
> Why it is recommended that in Linux the /swap partion size can be 
double 
> the physical RAM size ?

Where do you see it "recommended"?

In ancient times (before Linux) there was a rule of thumb that swap 
should be 2x physical memory or at least a bit more then 1x for Unix 
systems.  There were 2 reasons for that as I understand.  1) an 
artifact of how the swapping code worked.  2) so there was sufficient 
space for all of memory in the event of a panic (which wrote all of 
memory to the swap device, which Linux doesn't do).

Nowadays with memory speeds so much greater the disk speeds, having a 
huge amount of swap for most workloads doesn't really help.  If you are 
using that much swap, your performance is really going to suck.  Just 
get more memory.

--
Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel.
Archive:       http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/
FAQ:           http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/