Re: tlug: Caldera Japanese version (more comments)

[shimpei@example.com]

You(Andrew Drapp) wrote:
> Just wondering, in the good old days, we used to say that a swap 
> partition should be 2N+1, where N is the RAM on your computer.  Is
> this still the conventional wisdom?  Is that only reasonable for computers
> with little ram?  On a machine 128MB, a 257MB swap file just seems
> a little large to me.

Short answer: no.

Long answer: This was true for old Unices in the old days, when your
virtual memory size was only as large as your swap space.  (Mac OS
still uses this scheme today, in case anyone cares.) Linux's virtual
memory size is RAM + swap, which means that the swap space can be
small if everything you do fits in RAM.

Whether 257MB is too large is entirely dependent on how the computer
is used. If you need a lot of memory on an irregular basis, then
having a big swap space is entirely reasonable. If you need a lot
of memory on a regular basis, you should get more RAM instead.
For most people, 257MB is probably too much--128MB is more than enough.
OTOH, disk space is dirt cheap these days, so who cares?

Shimpei.

PS I just ran free(1). 

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         95808      89804       6004      32008       2008      24112
-/+ buffers/cache:      63684      32124
Swap:        68508      54868      13640

Now I'm a bit scared. I'm not running anything right now besides KDE
(just kwm, really; I'm too much of an command-line Luddite to bother
with all those cute KDE utilities), Netscape, an army of kterms, and
xemacs. How the heck does that add up to ~115MB of memory usage?

-- 
Shimpei Yamashita   山下晋平      <http://www.submm.caltech.edu/%7Eshimpei/>
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