If you're using over 200MB of swap, your system would be moving slower than
some continents. There is nothing really _wrong_ in having over 200MB of
swap, but there would be nothing to gain. If you need over 200MB (assuming
you have a decent level of RAM), either you're doing something _very_
memory-intensive (e.g. running a busy server) or (more likely) there is
something wrong (like a rogue process or a memory leak).
In other words, the 200MB swap limit is simply a rule-of-thumb based on
practicality. You don't need to follow it to-the-letter, but you most likely
won't gain anything by having anything bigger. In fact, since filesystems
tend to become slower as thet become larger, your system could even slow down.
RAM is relatively cheap nowadays. The best thing you can do to increase your
system speed would be to have enough RAM so that you don't need and swap at
all.
On Fri, 17 Aug 2001 16:47, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Good helpful example. I use ten desktops: 2 for monitoring, one for
> superuser terminal, one for email, one for instant messaging, 2 for
> browsing, one for writing programs, one non-superuser terminal for running
> them, and one for home directory. Yes, I realize this is sort of
> outrageously spread out but I'm just sort of playing right now to get a
> feel for how I'd like to use the desktops and the Linux software. My
> question is: since having all these things open only ever uses 250MB, do I
> follow the rule proposed here of adding some arbitrary percent of swap, or
> do I use the other rule of RAM x 2 up to 200MB? My most important question
> is WHY WOULD MORE SWAP BE BAD? Are there really inefficiencies with more
> swap? Why would 256M of RAM + 20M of swap behave better than 256M of RAM +
> 10 gigs of swap? I'm using extreme examples, but I'm just trying to wrap
> my head around why there is a cap to the amount of swap you would want
> (other than the fact you've got limited hard disk real estate, but assume
> that wasn't an issue...).
>
> Thanks again,
> Isaac
>
> Quoting Travis Olds <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> > On Fri, 17 Aug 2001 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > > This has me curious. If I don't need much swap, should I not make
> >
> > much swap?
> >
> > > Or is there no upper limit? If it's the more the marrier, why not
> >
> > always just
> >
> > > make, say, 500MB?
> >
> > The point of swap space is to allow you to have more programs
> > `running'
> > than you can actually fit in your physical memory. If you have swap,
> > when
> > you exaust all of your physical memory the OS can "swap to disk" those
> > bits of memory that are not actually being accesses. In this way the
> > fact
> > that they are not in physical memory and are on slow disk doesn't
> > matter
> > because that bit of memory is not being accessed. When it does need to
> > be
> > accessed it gets swapped back in and seomething else is swapped
> > out.
> >
> > Determining th right amount of swap space is really black
> > magic. It should be the case that swap + phyical + (some margin of a
> > few
> > %) = the total amount of memory used by all applications you might wish
> > to
> > have running at the one time. If you've already got a linux box then
> > just
> > try opening up everything you might ever want opened at once, check
> > the
> > momory consumption, add a few % to this number, and that should be
> > about
> > your total swap + physical memory number.
--
Sridhar Dhanapalan.
"There are two major products that come from Berkeley:
LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
-- Jeremy S. Anderson
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