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How Big Should My Swap Partition Be?

Posted by timothy on from the wait-until-ram-is-infinite-then-double-it dept.

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?

4 of 900 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What Has Changed? by setagllib · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

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    Sam ty sig.
  2. Re:Errr... check your math. by evilviper · · Score: 5, Funny

    8GB swap on a 120GB drive is 7%, not .07%. On a 200GB drive, it's 4%, not .04%, etc.

    It's "Verizon math"...

    Just my 0.02 cents worth.

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    Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
  3. Re:What Has Changed? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Some people actually want to debug something and find out *why* windows crashed."

    It crashed because they booted it. Next.

  4. Cool Performance Tip by Zoxed · · Score: 4, Funny

    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 :-(