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?

Comments

Re:What Has Changed?

[meringuoid]

Yeah, your 256MB of space was trivial when you had a 30GB hard drive ... and 8GB of space is still trivial with a 750GB hard drive.

I have an Eee 901. It has 1GiB of RAM and 20GB of disk space. A swap partition on the 'twice your RAM' rule would be far from trivial.

I decided to be bold and installed Hardy with no swap partition. It seems to work just fine so far; Firefox greys out for a few seconds sometimes while loading pages, which might have to do with my reckless configuration, but on the whole it's pretty snappy.

As for my desktop PC, it has 4GiB of RAM. I followed the traditional rule when I installed on that. I don't think that swap partition has ever even been used.

Re:With a caveat...

[Gewalt]

Oh dear FSM, Please for the sake of everyones sanity, NEVER LET WINDOWS GROW THE SWAPFILE! besides the fact it it will fragment the pagefile, it will also completely lock up the computer for X amount of time... right when you need it most! ...it ALWAYS happens at a bad time.

Re:What Has Changed?

[timster]

Perhaps you'd like to tell us whether a GB is base 2 or base 10 then.

You obviously aren't worth your SALT!

Remember kids, it DEPENDS!

Bandwidth? Base 10 -- always has been.
ROM? Base 2 -- always has been -- and traditionally in bits, not bytes.
RAM? Base 2, and bytes.
Hard disk? Base 10 in the manufacturer's specs, base 2 in the OS display. Always has been that way, always will be.
Floppies? Base 2 until you get to MB, where 1MB = 1000 base 2 KB (seriously).
Clock speeds? Base 10, always has been, always will be.
Flash? Who knows.

Isn't it great that we have such an easy, convenient system that is focused around the needs of us humans, and not the needs of the computers (who don't care in the slightest).