At 01:22 PM 12/9/02 -0500, james miller wrote:
I cannot help you with "definitely" answers. But I can tell you the rules of thumb I've used when setting up workstations (which don't exactly use the mix of stuff you ask about, but come close).Let me pose the RAM question in another way to see if it can elicit a generic, "rule-of-thumb" response this way. If a person uses their computer as a sort of personal workstation using a fairly recent distro and requires that it have an Xwindows gui, using applications like web browsers, email clients, wordprocessing software and maybe Gimp on occassion, at what point would such a person need to have a swap partition? In other words, can it be stated in somewhat generic terms "if said user had less than X MB RAM, they will definitely need a swap partition"? And what about guidelines for swap partition size in such a case: can such be stated as well? Like, say, "if this individual has only 32 MB RAM, he should have a 64 MB swap partition" or "if he has 64 MB RAM he'll only need a 64 MB swap partition"?
If I am setting up a system with 256 MB or less of RAM, I include a swap partition. If the system is using a modern hard disk (that is, one that is 20 GB or more), I make swap twice the size of RAM; if I is using a small, old hard disk, I make it equal to RAM for sizes close to 256, twice RAM for significantly smaller sizes (trading off filesystem space against swap space is itself a judgment call for 128 and 192 MB systems).
If I were setting up a system with more than 256 MB of RAM and a modern hard disk (and this is all I really do these days for workstations), I *create* a swap partition equal in size to RAM, but I do not make it active. I have never actually found a need for a swap partition on a workstation with 256 MB of RAM or more, but that way I have one in reserve if I need it.
As a general matter, if you are running a system that uses swap regularly (rather than very rarely, say just when you custom compile apps or kernels), the performance hit you are taking probably justifies paying the relatively small cost of adding RAM if you can (of course, some older mobos still in circulation, such as older E-Machine Celeron boards, won't take more than 256 MB, limiting your options). And I've seen occasional segfaults that *seem* to be associated with swap access in recent 2.4.x kernels, so I try to avoid even rare uses of swap on my newer (512+ MB RAM) systems.
It's hard for me to think sensibly about what I'd do on a system with, say, 16 or 32 MB of RAM, because I can't seriously imagine setting up such a system as a workstation today (though I use such systems for specialized purposes ... routers, mainly). Back when I ran such systems, I used swap that was twice the size of RAM, and that's probably what I'd do today up to 64 MB, maybe even up to 128 MB.
Bottom line, though ... there are no hard and fast guidelines these days for "best practice" swap setup.
--
-------------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"--------
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, California, USA [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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