I agree that care is needed when making reference to books. The development
of Linux is moving so fast, most are already presenting dated material by
the time they hit the streets. I think my first question would be how do
you use your machine, i.e. are you the kind of person that opens up a lot of
apps and leaves them open or do you open one and then close it before going
to the next. Then I would address the actual ratio of physical RAM to the
amount of Swap you may need. If I were setting with 64M or less, I would opt
for a larger Swap, especially if I keep multiple apps open. I would consider
it a temp solution until I could add more RAM.
With the price of RAM relatively low and the cost of large hard drives dropping,
it may simply boil down to what you are comfortable with. If you have a 20G
hard drive, having a 256M swap partition that sees very little use, because
you also have 128M (or more) of RAM, wouldn't seem to be a very big deal.
Barry :-)
On Fri, 03 November 2000, Larry Marshall wrote:
>
> Times change and one of the things that's changed is that we're no longer
> trying to get multi-tasking to occur in a small memory space (small
> defined as being way less than user demand). I suspect that the "twice
> your RAM" rule of thumb has more to do with efficiency (if your swap
> becomes more than twice your RAM it's either not going to be used (too low
> a demand) or there's simply not going to be enough RAM to 'service' the
> demand that's requiring the swap.
>
> In contrast, using less than twice is quite often the better way to go as
> you simply don't need it because you've got so much memory in the
> machine. I'm sure that if you compared swap usage of a 64mb and 512mb
> single-user machine you'd see this clearly.
>
> Cheers --- Larry
>
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