On 17/06/19 00:29, Grant Taylor wrote: >> Drives are cheap. The old "swap is twice ram" rule actually isn't an >> old wife's tale - the basic Unix swap mechanism NEEDS twice ram. > > No, it doesn't. Not any more. It hasn't for quite a while.
So you didn't read what I wrote ... Par for the course :-( That was a *historic* statement. It's as true today as it was ten years ago, because it's not referring to today's reality. The basic Unix mechanism needs twice ram. It's inherent in the design of the thing. Whether linux no longer uses the Unix mechanism, or it's had the hell optimised out of it I don't know. Either way, machines today get by on precious little swap - that's fine. Historic note - the early linux 2.4 vanilla kernels enforced the twice ram rule - a lot of people who didn't read the release notes got nasty shocks when their machines locked up the moment they touched swap ... And okay my machine only has 16GB of ram (and 64GB of swap - 32GB each across two disks), but I'm pretty sure that if I followed your guidelines, an emerge would crash my system as the tmpfs ran out of space ... And those people who wrote your guidelines? Are they the same clueless people who believe the twice ram rule is pure fiction? (As I said, it is *historical* *fact*). And why should I believe people who tell me the rule no longer applies, if they can't tell me WHY it no longer applies? I'd love to be enlightened - why can't anybody do that? Cheers, Wol
