How much swap on laptop?

[Marc Schwartz]

Dotan Cohen wrote:
> I've just got a Dell laptop with 2GB RAM. 2*2.5=5GB of swap? This
> seems like a bit much, but I'd like some opinions on the matter. Also,
> I've heard that the swap should be as close to the center of the disk
> as possible- does that mean that I should use hda1 as swap? Opinions
> welcome. Thanks.

I have 2Gb of RAM on my Dell 5150 (3.2 Ghz P4).

I have 1 Gb of swap set up and I as I type this post, 176 Kb (yes Kb) is 
in use.  Given this, I am not sure that the location of the swap space 
is critical.

Even when running heavy analyses using R (http://www.r-project.org/), I 
rarely see much swap being used.

BTW, my swap is also encrypted (along with /home, /var and /tmp) using 
dm-crypt/LUKS and I don't see any notable performance hit using a 7200 
RPM 60 Gb HD.

The old guideline of using 2x RAM for swap is, I don't believe, 
applicable with this much physical RAM installed and seems to me to be 
a waste of HD space.

HTH,

Marc Schwartz