[SWLUG] KDE slowing down problem?

[Robert McQueen]

On Sun, Jul 28, 2002 at 12:45:27PM +0100, David Elir Evans wrote:
> If significant amounts of RAM are added is it also advisable to enlarge 
> swap space ?

Not really. It used to be the case with early 2.4 kernels (IIRC) and
older versions, as well as other UNIX systems, that a significant
proportion of what was stored in memory was also stored on disk, so that
it could be freed from memory at times of high load by merely deleting
it, rather than having to move it to disk. This is where the 'swap
should be twice physical RAM' rule of thumb originates.

However, this is no longer the case with current 2.4 kernels, with
either the mainline (aa) or rmap VMs, and only serves to waste disk
space. I have 760Mb of RAM on my desktop machine, and a gratuitously
large 1Gb of swap which is rarely touched except when I try and do
something stupid like put an ISO in tmpfs. In normal usage my GNOME
desktop takes up around 350Mb of RAM, leaving a good 400 or so for
caching, which makes the system very fast in practical use.

I'd recommend 256Mb of RAM for a graphical desktop environment such as
KDE or GNOME, just so that after loading the whole thing, and swapping
any unused bits, the kernel has enough space to cache files.

Regards,
Rob