> No, I wouldn't say it's all that ridiculous. Of course these things are > relative: what you do with your machines may not require you to ever
It's not ridiculous either, unless you're thinking of emailing it somewhere :). > drop into swap. Kernels around 2.4.10 and earlier had serious problems > with memory, and requiring a few extra meg of memory would not I'm not sure I agree, but that's a minor point. Surely some of these kernels had wonky use of swap, but AFAIK all linux kernels viewed swap as additive, rather than as 'backup store' on BSD systems. BSD is why most older people quote the 1.5 X as much as RAM, or even 2X swap for what you have in RAM rule. Of course, recent kernels have been getting more well behaved; I seem to remember that this was just an anomaly of some 2.4.x kernels, though. > disk space, you'll see that 512M or even a Gig of swap is actually > smaller than on older machines. Again, it's all relative and depends on > your usage patterns. Case in point: my 386sx slackware/sls system many years ago. IIRC, I had 16 megs of swap on a 345 meg drive. This comes out to 4.6% of the drive used as swap. A gigabyte on a 30 gig drive only comes out to 3.33% of the drive committed to swap. > the swap space. But you should also consider what would happen if you > run out of swap space. Hint: it's not pretty. My favorite swap related anecdote (true story - this actualy happened:) A friend of mine (who is a fairly light Linux user, had migrated from a Sinclair with 128k or so of RAM to a 386 with 4 megs. He thought 4 megs was more room than he'd ever need. He didn't set up a swap partition at all - and then look what happened when he tried to run 2 copies of emacs at the same time. The kernel took *46 minutes* just to respond to the ctrl-x ctrl-c commands to quit one of those instances.) And of course, this was all in-memory thrashing since there wasn't any swapping to disk.
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