Ditto to what Ray said. Perhaps you could run your system with a 'swap file' and see how big it ever gets. Then make a swap partition just that size or a little larger. ;-)
My current firewall-router (aDSL to 100 Mb LAN) has 32 megabytes of RAM and has not used any swap memory, AFAICR. Another workstation with 64 M of RAM has used 3 M of swap. Another workstation with 160 M of RAM has used 2 M of swap. Another laptop with 16 M of RAM, XFfree86 v4.0.3, and I just ran Netscape v4.77 under fvwm95, loaded a small web page, has used 2.6 M of swap. IMHO, it depends. ;-) HTH, Chuck Ray Olszewski wrote: > > At 01:15 PM 12/8/02 +0000, Rolf Edlund wrote: > >Originally to: james niland > > > > > > jn> I know some people who run happily without a swap at all. > > > >How low RAM can I use, without running a swap ? Can I for example do it on > >a 486 > >with 4 MB RAM ? > > The way you ask this question, it has no real answer. How little memory a > system can run with depends on what tasks it is doing. And the choice of > CPU is pretty much irrelevant to this question (its only slight relevance > is in the smaller size of CPU-specific kernels). > > That said ... running any sort of Linux system in less than 8 MB of real > (not swap) RAM poses special challenges ... most modern distros can't even > install on such systems (only Slackware, I think, still offers a "low > memory" install option) and you won't be able to do much with such a > system. In practice, the smallest systems I've ever run without swap were > 486s with 16 MB of RAM, and that was for special purpose systems like > routers. While these days I routinely run my workstations without a swap > partition, they have at least 256 MB of RAM. > > -- > -------------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"-------- > Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo > Palo Alto, California, USA [EMAIL PROTECTED] > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs
