[Nottingham] size of swap partition

[Robert Davies]

On Monday 20 January 2003 13:37, you wrote:
> BUNTER MATTHEW wrote:
> > --- Reçu de       VITEUR.BUNTERMA 04 72 96 57 77             20/01/03
> > 13.59 Got a PC with 1 Gig RAM and I'm confused about the different
> > suggestions regarding swap size. When I had 256 M RAM I did a swap
> > partition of 512. But what sort of size should I allocate when having 1
> > Gig of RAM? Double?
> >
> > For info it's going to do various tasks, have a web server running,
> > database, be my internet access point, bit of development, workstation
> > etc. Due to some games I have it will also run Windows.
>
> With that amount of RAM, the thing should never need to swap!
>
> The 'have swap x2 system RAM' is probably a historical bit of dozywin
> technical advice. However, it does give a reasonable maximum swap size

No actually according to Linus Torvalds it's a theoretical minimum to handle 
all possible worst cases.  In practice with lazy allocation, you can get away 
with less, but it depends on the VM variant.

In your case,  no swap or swap size equal to RAM probably be OK, but 2x 
ensures stability in face of less than optimal VM behaviour.

Rob