You can do without swap if you must; however allocating a few hundred megs of swap on a multi-gigabyte drive won't hurt and can in fact improve things in a number of ways: 1: If a process is idle and taking up a large amount of memory; it can be swapped out to disk to allow other processes to use the memory. Think virtualization, web servers and the like. without swap; when the kernel runs out of memory it will start killing processes; this can get ugly. With swap; you notice the system is using swap and can do something about it before things go critical. secondly: tuxonice and uswsusp 2 of the hybernate solutions for Linux write the suspend images to the swap space. If you don't have swap then you can't suspend to disk. s2both suspends to disk and ram; so if you power up the machine again from standby the memory image is used; if that fails the disk snapshot is used. my personal recommendation is to allocate the maximum your physical ram is likely to be to swapspace, in your current case; 2gb of swap. With large capacity drives beeing under 30 cents a gig; this is not really a problem in 2007. swap partitions are faster to access; however if you allocate space to swap then get more ram you can allways add in a swap file. In fact; there are howto documents on how to share swapspace between Windows and Linux if that helps also. Regards, Kerry. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Holmes" <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca> Sent: Monday, January 07, 2008 5:44 PM Subject: Swap Question > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: RIPEMD160 > > Hey, the swap question has come up for me now as I will probably be > rebuilding my Linux environment. The old days with small memory, it > was recommended to have a swap something like twice the system > memory. But with larger systems, that seems less valid as I've been > hearing. I have 2 GB of main system memory and when I include the > high-memory option in the kernel, I get all of it available to me. > With 2 gigs, would it be necessary to have any swap at all? I mean, > with this big a machine, could I go and install Linux and not have a > swap at all? I will probably be doing Slackware again do to my > familiarity with it. When I looked briefly at Debian the other day, > it appeared to me that the installer would insist on building a swap > partition regardless of my memory size. > > I'm just wondering if anyone has some ideas on this topic. Thanks. > - -- > HolmesGrown Solutions > The best solutions for the best price! > http://holmesgrown.ld.net/ > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (GNU/Linux) > > iD8DBQFHgeaIWSjv55S0LfERA0fDAJ9/LmLZ+G2OOyAqzbGSubo/YbctXwCgq2gB > Yv42oBYY+42Lc1dcQZ2na9E= > =jErU > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- > > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup >
