Re: RAM v/s Swap Size (was Error while transfering install image on HDD- Out of disk space)
Your swap should ideally be twice your RAM.
Could someone explain this to me... (please no lengthy explantation of what swap space means, please... I'm a computer science graduate :) )
I've never quite figured out why. After all, your system uses a certain amount of virtual memory that depends on the apps you use.
physical ram + swap space used = virtual memory used
Thus shouldn't you need *less* swap space if you have more RAM? I have 384MB of RAM and my swap space usage remains stubbornly stuck at 0. Wouldn've been an awful waste of 768 MB or hard disk space if I'd followed that rule-of-the-thumb!!
(Instead what I've done is to remove the swap partition and allocate swap files if I ever do anything memory-intensive enough to require more space... and that has never happened)
On Mon, 2002-07-15 at 12:40, Vinay Pai wrote:
Your swap should ideally be twice your RAM.
Could someone explain this to me... (please no lengthy explantation of what swap space means, please... I'm a computer science graduate :) )
This should answer your question:
http://kt.zork.net/kernel-traffic/kt20010330_113.html#6
If you follow the thread, you will come across comments like this:
"You're not supposed to do anything, that's just a general rule of thumb. If your system hardly ever swaps, use a swapfile, because speed doesn't matter a lot anyway."
"You don't really *need* swap, linux works fine without."
"> So if you never swapped at all under 2.2.x, you should not need any
swap space in 2.4.x either.
Right."
BTW, here's something I noticed about KT - only the mails by big popular names are reported from any thread. For example the URL I've quoted gives only one short quote from Rik van Riel's mail, although the actual discussion in the thread was in an entirely different spirit - it doesn't even reflect the thread correctly!
HTH, Sameer.
At 12:40 PM 7/15/02 +0530, you wrote:
Your swap should ideally be twice your RAM.
Could someone explain this to me... (please no lengthy explantation of what swap space means, please... I'm a computer science graduate :) )
[snip]
(Instead what I've done is to remove the swap partition and allocate swap files if I ever do anything memory-intensive enough to require more space... and that has never happened)
You are right. But that rule-of-thumb is of the days when 32Mb RAM used to be *lots* of RAM. The reason for the 2 to 2 1/2 times larger swap was to have sufficient virtual memory to load reasonable amount of software without running out of memory. For example on my 386 with 8Mb RAM I had a 20Mb swap partition. When I used to start up X and netscape most of the swap got used. But I agree that beyond 128Mb of RAM the swap size should be fixed to about 100Mb or something... unless specifically required otherwise.
quasi
Hello,
I have a suggestion, that perhaps has been implemented and I do not know about it. Why don't we keep a set of configuration files in one of the ilug servers? These will be the config files needed to run programs (what goes in /etc, usually) with comments from the person who writes them. People can put their config files for particular things, that are either not clearly documented, or that takes time to figure out. In that way, if I need to run something (like now, I need exim) I can first look at what others have done, without need to ask and wait for a reply. Of course, a particular program can have several examples of config files written by different people. *Very important* is to add comments to the files, explain changes and stuff like that.
I'm willing to start with files from my system.
What do you think?
Pablo. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Pablo Ares Gastesi. School of Mathematics, TIFR, Mumbai 400 005, INDIA pablo@math.tifr.res.in http://www.math.tifr.res.in/~pablo/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------
On Tue, 2002-07-16 at 07:26, Pablo Ares Gastesi wrote: [snip]
know about it. Why don't we keep a set of configuration files in one of the ilug servers? These will be the config files needed to run programs
[snip]
I'm willing to start with files from my system.
What do you think?
Sounds like good idea!
Rajesh
Hi Pablo, I think its a brilliant idea! We could start with something as basic as 'lilo.conf'.All newbies have to edit this one soon after installation. We could move on to 'fstab', 'inittab' and 'crontab' et al. This way configuration would become a matter of 'uncommenting' options after reading the appropriate directions....something like the 'httpd.conf' file now. ciao abhijeet
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abhijeet -
Pablo Ares Gastesi -
Q u a s i -
Rajesh Deo -
Sameer D. Sahasrabuddhe -
Vinay Pai