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How Much Virtual Memory is Enough?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the how-large-is-your-swap-partition dept.

whitroth asks: "Ten years ago, Received Wisdom said that virtual memory should be, on the average, two to two-and-a-half times real memory. In these days, where 2G RAM is not unusual, and many times is not that uncommon, is this unreasonable? What's the sense of the community as to what is a reasonable size for swap these days?"

3 of 544 comments (clear)

  1. Not much, anymore... by FishWithAHammer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Under Windows it seems it'll swap out whether the free RAM is needed or not, no matter what (there's a registry setting to change this though). Under Linux, you won't swap much anyway unless you need it.

    I run a Core Duo laptop with 1GB of RAM and have never swapped out in Linux, no matter what I was doing.

    --
    "You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
  2. I use this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    2X physical memory for under 2G RAM
    2G swap for up to 8G RAM
    +1G swap for every 4G RAM beyond that

  3. Don't forget disk cache by uler · · Score: 5, Insightful

    One of the real advantages of using swap isn't to avoid memory exhaustion at all; by moving infrequently accessed pages from memory you make more room for the disk cache, thereby possibly improving overall system performance by reducing hard drive reads.