How much swap on laptop?

[Rick Stevens]

On Wed, 2006-12-13 at 18:29 +0000, Chris Jones wrote:
> On Tuesday 12 December 2006 6:52 pm, Todd Zullinger wrote:
> > Matthew Miller wrote:
> > > On Tue, Dec 12, 2006 at 09:14:13AM -0600, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> > >> using the system for. You may not need any swap, or you may find
> > >> you need 1GB of swap.
> > >
> > > If you need 1GB of swap, you probably *really* need more RAM.
> >
> > If you have a laptop with 1GB of RAM and you want to use hibernate,
> > you'll want more than 1GB of swap.  That's what Mikkel was referring
> > to in his message.
> 
> I think it is generally a good idea to try and have as much swap as ram for 
> hibernate.

The old rule-of-thumb was swap should be twice your RAM size.  I still
adhere to that, however if you ever get to the point where that's
becoming an issue, you have other problems and performance will suffer.
> 
> That said, on my laptop I have 1.25 G ram with 1G swap (originally I had 512M 
> ram but upgrade a year back, and didn't increase the swap size as I cannot 
> easily repartition) . 

Did you ever think about adding a swap _file_?  It's easily done.

> However, I have never run into problems with 
> hibernation failing because of this - most of the time hibernation only uses 
> 200-400M, a small fraction of the available 1G swap.

Yes, actually hibernation will only use the amount of swap necessary to
save the active RAM contents (essentially, all of your active stuff gets
swapped out).

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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
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