[Gllug] Re: [Gllugadmin] Migrating

[Peter Childs]

On Tue, 11 Feb 2003, Tethys wrote:

> 
> Chris Bell writes:
> 
> >   M$ creates a swap file on the Windows partition. Linux normally requires
> >a special format swap partition equal to or larger than twice the RAM
> >available in the computer.
> 
> Note that you can share swap between Windows and Linux, which can free
> up a little more disk space, should you need it.
> 
	Done that its a little difficult (unless anyone knows a better 
method but... (Don't do it currently)

1. On Linux Startup create large file using somthing like dd
2. mkswap that large file
3. Use it
4. On Linux Shutdown delete large file so window can use the space for its 
dynamic swap file

	Also the fact that windows uses dynamic swap seams to be one of 
the biggest reasons for its intability as is crashes quite often with 
invalid page faults.

	Oh if you have large quanities of memory there is probaly no real 
requirement for large quanities of swap. 

The rules of thumb where you need twice the swap you have in memory can be 
ignored once you have more than say 128Mb of Ram. If you have 512Mb of Ram 
you are hardly going to need 1Gb of Swap!!!! So set up so that you have at 
least 512Mb of total memory (swap +  memory) and you should be fine. 
	I think the formula was written when 16Mb or 32Mb of memory was 
perfectly normal.
	It also depends what you are planning to do. If you wish to run
KDE, Gnome and StarOffice more memory is going to help, But if all you are
going to run if a printer server you can probably cope with more swap! Use
free to see what you memory is doing Most machines with more than 256Mb
will never really use any swap. (under Linux) (Unless you are running a
busy web site a busy database or Running Windows :)

For example on my home machine.

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        255448     232200      23248          0      26104     165180
-/+ buffers/cache:      40916     214532
Swap:       273096      20524     252572

	I make that 23Mb free memory and 20.5Mb used swap so if I had no 
swap I would have 3Mb of free memory and thats on a bady configured 
machine!
 
Peter Childs
Experiance Only......
More Comments?



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