Slashdot Mirror
How Big Should My Swap Partition Be?
For the last 10 years, I have been asking people more knowledgeable than I, "How big should my swap be?" and the answer has always been "Just set it to twice your RAM and forget about it." In the old days, it wasn't much to think about — 128 megs of RAM means 256 megs of swap. Now that I have 4 gigs of RAM in my laptop, I find myself wondering, "Is 8 gigs of swap really necessary?" How much swap does the average desktop user really need? Does the whole "twice your RAM" rule still apply? If so, for how much longer will it likely apply? Or will it always apply? Or have I been consistently misinformed over the last 10 years?
Old memes
640k is enough...
in Soviet Russia drive partitions you.
42 Petabytes for Vista, the next version, who knows.
The page file system needs to be able to juggle the
fake RAM sizes effectively, So petabytes seems to fit the bill.
How many Windows users do you know with a swap partition?
I hate it when that happens. A helpful popup told me I ran out of CPU cycles just a few days ago, and I had to order a whole bunch online. Cost thousands! Still waiting for them to arrive.
Sam ty sig.
It's "Verizon math"...
Just my 0.02 cents worth.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
It lets you leak more memory for longer, this is a necessary feature for running modern software.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
home alone is a pretty nifty idea. Especially if you're a kid and it's around Christmas.
"Some people actually want to debug something and find out *why* windows crashed."
It crashed because they booted it. Next.
The system is giving the program all that memory - to give nothing in return would be rude. That is why you should return 1 instead of 0.
while on the other hand, some of us sad people have gone through four different laptops while still using the same version of linux...
that matters. It's how you use it....
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Yeah, that's all fine and good until you print an old paper scanned in from jstor to your printer, it uses pstopdfil and uses as much memory as I can buy and continues to swap like a drunken bastard. Not using the printer is not exactly an option here.
"Enough ram for file caching" is approximately infinite RAM
You know what I love? I love how you're not afraid to say something unbelievably stupid without irony. You should run for President.
It's been a long time.
Why does everyone put their swap on a slow harddrive ? A Gentoo running mate of mine in the pub showed me how to map the swap file into RAM: runs much faster there.
(Although suspend does not seem to work now :-(