[Nottingham] size of swap partition

Robert Hart nottingham at mailman.lug.org.uk
Mon Jan 20 14:34:03 2003


On Mon, 2003-01-20 at 13:37, Martin wrote:

> The 'have swap x2 system RAM' is probably a historical bit of dozywin 
> technical advice. However, it does give a reasonable maximum swap size 
> so that you can run the maximum of virtual memory without thrashing your 
> system to a standstill.

No quite. The actual requirement depends on the version off the kernel
you are running. There are recent kernel versions (early 2.4.x - I
forget which exactly) which needed swap > RAM x 2 or no swap at all.

I'm pretty sure that this requirement has been relaxed, but it's still a
fairly good rule of thumb. 

Rob