How much swap?

[Mikkel L. Ellertson]

Uno Engborg wrote:
> I am wondering how much swap space I need in modern Linux such as FC6.
> 
> I'm planning to set up a system Pentium Dual  Core with 8G RAM, and I
> don't expect I need much
> more than that for my apps.
> 
> Would I need a swap anyway.  There is some old rule of thumb to have
> twice as much virtual
> memory as you have physical RAM, but that sounds a bit ridiculous  as it
> would take a lot
> of time to swap in/out this much memory from disk.
> 
> In some other Unixes the swap space was needed
> to preserve dump information in case of a panic, are there any such
> considerations
> in Linux?
> 
> 
> Regards
> Uno Engborg
> 
The 2X physical memory rule has not applied for a long time. With
that much memory, how much swap you need depends on if you are going
to use suspend to disk or not, and just what you are going to run.
If you are not going to use suspend to disk, then you may want to
set up a 500m swap partition, and monitor its use. If you end up
needing more, then create a swap file.

Mikkel
-- 

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