Swap space question

[Ric Moore]

On Sat, 2006-09-30 at 16:19 +0300, nicolas angel wrote:
> Hi,  i would to ask something about swap space:
> 
>  i quote from the book "How Linux Works—What Every Super-User Should
> Know"
> 
> "Reserve two to five times as much disk space as you have real memory
> for swap. It doesn't make sense to go any lower, because you may
> actually risk running out of memory. If you go higher and actually
> intend to use all of this swap space, you will likely suffer serious
> performance problems because the system will spend all of its time
> swapping (a condition known as thrashing). " 
> 
> i can't understand why if create a really big swap partition i will
> have a performance decrease????It seems to me
>  that in the worst case scenario, i will be throwing disk space
> [because the system will never use the swap partition if it doesn't
> need it......why this would have a negative impact on the
> system......] 

I think a lot of documentation was written in the days of 8 megs of
memory. I remember being the envy of the computer club with 16megs. At
install I've just let Fedora set it up for me without asking. 
-- 
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"There are two Great Sins in the world...
...the Sin of Ignorance, and 
...the Sin of Stupidity.
Only the former may be overcome." R.I.P. Dad.

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