On 01:47 07 May 2002, ABrady <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: | The rule of thumb is, 2-2.5 times RAM. I currently have 384MB installed | and 1GB swap. Most of my swap never gets used under most conditions. | I've had it up to about 700MB used once in the last 6 months. This on a | 2.4.X kernel which supposedly makes even more use of swap than the 2.2.X | kernels did. | | Do you need all of that swap space? I don't know. The rule would say | yes, though I admit it sure sounds like a lot. | | Maybe someone else can shed some light on that. I personally wanted to | go after the 128MB myth. That was true at one time (sort of). That | hasn't been true for quite some time.
As you say, the 128Mb limit is long dead. 2 to 2.5 is a good rule of thumb - if you need more than that then _typically_ you will be thrashing and performance will suck anyway. The main exception is big, often idle and for extended periods, tasks with state that's a pain to reestablish. For example, supposing you have some chunky things (live VMware sessions, big and remote VNC desktops, a large ongoing project with a big image in the gimp, etc) where you legitimately have a big fat program which _on_its_own_ fits ok into memory, but not with everything else. Supposing you have a few of these, but you only ever use one at a time, and that for a while at any one sitting. In that case it's well worth having lots of swap so you can have these things sitting there. When you sawitch tasks you'll sit for some time while lots of paging happens, and then you can proceed. So in short, if all your programs are generally active, having more swap than RAM just stops things crashing from lack of memory, but will soon thrash. But for some workloads where you're effectively using your swap for _swap_ as opposed to _paging_, it's worth it. Cheers, -- Cameron Simpson, DoD#743 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.zip.com.au/~cs/ We _like_ the starter! Wouldn't have it any other way. If it doesn't grind, take it back to the dealer and make them fix it! - Jon N. Steiger, DoD#1038, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________ Redhat-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
